Recently I caught up with Pito Salas, founder of my favorite RSS reader, BlogBridge. I have written about BlogBridge before (see Filtering RSS Feeds: BlogBridge BlogStarz and BlogBridge's Support for Reading Lists). Pito said that the latest release, BlogBridge 6.6, comes with Twitter support. This makes a lot of sense as Twitter is often used to share blog links. After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Now I like Twitter but see it primarily as a way to point to things. I find interesting stuff through Twitter. A RSS reader is another way to discovery stuff that you can then share through twitter. Here is a screen shot of the Twitter function in action sending out a Tweet with a short form link and a message.
Pito provides two scenarios on how Twitter and BlogBridge can work together.
In the first case, a person gets the news from blogs and likes to keep a presence on Twitter. One of the things people tend to often want to Tweet about is an interesting article or bit of information that they saw in one of the many blogs they follow. If they are using BlogBridge 6.6, they simply choose ‘Tweet This’ while reading the blog, and up pops a box, with the shortened url pre-populated. They type in their comment and press OK and away goes the Tweet.
In the second case, a product manager, PR person, techie, or any kind of info-junkie will want to know whenever their product or topic is mentioned in any blog. So they use BlogBridge and have standing searches through the BlogBridge SmartFeeds feature for the topic of interest. Today, if their topic of choice is mentioned on Twitter, they would also like to know this. With BlogBridge 6.6, they can simply create a Twitter SmartFeed, and find the mention.
SmartFeeds came out in a prior release. They allow you to define any number of criteria and tell BlogBridge to keep an eye out for certain information and collect it together in your SmartFeed. Criteria include: article, feed or guide, title, text, date, pinned, read/unread, rating and others. You can create as many SmartFeeds as you like. Below is a screen shot of the Smart Feed set up window.
Other recent features include the ability to add a post that comes up through Blogbridge to your own blog. You can display feeds from a photo site like Flickr in a photo album format. There is also the ability to tag a post with del.icio.us without moving out of BlogBridge. Here is a screen shot of this feature.
BlogBridge is both Open Source and free. There are some paid premium features for the real information junkie but most people, me included, do well on the free version. It runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac (my version). It has scored as best RSS reader for Linux on some recent surveys.
Here’s an “Introduction to Twitter” video that Pito recorded that will give you a visual introduction to the new stuff. This is smart move to integrate two content discovery tools as they did with del.icio.us. Pito also writes a great blog that covered my Twitter week posts ☺
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