Google adds Twitter notifications to FeedBurner
Google is taking a definite, “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach to Twitter as of late. With the addition of Twitter notifications to FeedBurner, it has just taken one more step to admitting their love.
There have been third-party services for some time now that will automatically send out a Tweet message on Twitter whenever you post a new article to your blog. It’s a rather simple process, and a service named TwitterFeed has become quite popular for doing this, the problem is that there can be quite a lengthy delay sometimes between when you publish and when the message goes out.
Well, as with most of the world’s problems, Google thinks it has come up with a solution.
It was announced today on the AdSense for Feeds blog (which seems odd since this has nothing to do with ads) that users of the FeedBurner RSS service from Google can now configure it to send out Tweets every time you publish a new blog post. You will of course need to be running your RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed through the service already, but once you have that running you will just need to add the info for your Twitter account and you’re done.
Google is claiming that the notifications sent to Twitter should be near instantaneous, but that of course will probably vary with server loads and so on.
This is an unusual move for Google because it usually just buys a service it wants to integrate with. People around the tech community have speculated for ages that Google will some day buy Twitter, but this is a sign, albeit a small one, to me that the company isn’t even trying at this moment. Add in that Twitter has said numerous times it isn’t for sale, and you get the feeling Google has decided to just peacefully co-exist with the service.
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December 20th, 2009
Ok for those who want it, I guess, but for the rest of us, how the heck can we get rid of it or turn the darn thing off?