Habitually Good

A couple of weeks ago, Google added a new feature to FeedBurner called Socialize. It is nothing more than a way to publish your feed items to a Twitter account. But in doing so, it has just threatened to take out TwitterFeed. Or at least, people who don’t do a lot of professional social media marketing (which is a lot of us) no longer need to use TwitterFeed if they are already using FeedBurner. People like me.

Let me explain.

I use TwitterFeed to publish new posts I make on this blog to my Twitter account as tweets. In order to do so, I have to provide TwitterFeed with my RSS feed (which is already burned on FeedBurner), and then add my Twitter account on it (TwitterFeed initially did not support OAuth), and then I can configure my feed with various options such as how frequently should it check the feed for new updates, and how many tweets it should publish to my timeline, plus other things such as which URL service to use to shorten the link, and what text to prefix or suffix to the tweet.

What Google Socialize does is pretty much the same. It lets me connect my FeedBurner feed to my Twitter account through OAuth, and then lets me setup similar parameters. Both support more or less the same configuration options (except that Google also supports inserting hashtags based on post category).

One advantage that TwitterFeed has is that it allows you to publish to more than just Twitter (it supports Facebook, Ping.fm, etc), but to me that doesn’t matter – all I care about is Twitter.

The biggest advantage that FeedBurner has on the other hand is that it doesn’t ask you for a polling frequency. As long as your blogging setup is wired to ping their server via XML-RPC (which is how mine is, and most people who use FeedBurner have that), the tweet is sent out as soon as the post is made.

Actually, to me even that is not the biggest advantage. The biggest advantage to me is that it reduces the number of services that I have to deal with by One. I no longer have to deal with TwitterFeed, and as a result I have deleted my feed from there. When I post this article, and you see it in your Twitter Timeline, it will be courtesy FeedBurner’s socialize feature, and not TwitterFeed.

Here’s the post by Google about Socialize.

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