ReadTwit, An interesting Added Value

I ran across this post about ReadTwit over the weekend and was immediately intrigued. I’ve watched as Twitter has become a source of interesting links being passed around by the folks I follow, I’m missing some really great information.

Now, as I’ve said before, I have no desire, nor the time, to try and read every tweet from the people I follow, nor do I have any expectation that I’m going to check out anything close to 100% of the links they are sharing, but I sure would like a way to see more than the 10%, less when I’m too busy to really check my twitter stream at all, that I currently see.

The other downside to trying to follow links to things shared on Twitter, is that most times you just get a link, with maybe a brief description, or the title. It’s a lot of work to decide what’s worth the click and what isn’t, and again, when pressed for time, the title better be darned good to get me to click!

Thus, my excitement about ReadTwit:

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.
Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.

Naturally, I went to check it out, and added my ReadTwit feed to Google Reader right away. The next morning, I had 97 items waiting for me in that feed, stuff I normally wouldn’t have seen as it got tweeted while I slept, with 2000 characters of available items as a preview instead of 140, and the ability to filter out certain hashtags or users. I was able to skim through it right along with the other things I normally browse through in Reader. I haven’t started using the filters yet, but I can see where I will start filtering users who send a lot of links to a subject that isn’t highly relevant to me. I don’t know, it’s sort of an experiment at this point, to see just what kind of ReadTwit feed I can come up with that allows me to see more of the links people I’m following are sharing, without having to spend all of my free time catching up with Twitter!

However it ends up, I’m willing to bet it helps me see more links to good information than I’m seeing now.

I also wonder if this doesn’t help, at least a little, with the security risks involved with shortened URLs, and not always knowing where they are leading you? Not sure if it’s a cure-all for that, but can’t see where it would hurt either.

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