ベン・ギルド (Ben Guild)


“Twitter Migration & Networking Tool” (for Google Reader) being retired on July 15

I built this tool in late 2011 to automate the migration of the bulk of my Google Reader feed subscriptions to being Twitter “follows” instead. — However, as many of you know, Google Reader was “powered down on July 1st, 2013. 😢

Before Twitter, which is basically “express blogging” of text and multimedia in 140 characters or less, people would primarily use their blogs to post exciting thoughts, images, links, stories, etc. — Because all of the content is crammed into the approximate length of an SMS text-message, it is tremendously easier to read through and “skim.”

Because Google Reader would show you most if not all of the content from the original source (which could be a lengthy article), it became impossible to keep up with by comparison once you had a certain amount of feed subscriptions, and content from less verbose sources was often lost amongst those that would post almost every day. — My Google Reader account always had “1000+” unread posts, which was a bit daunting.

Screenshot of TMNT

This “Twitter Migration & Networking Tool” (TMNT, for short) that I built scanned your Google Reader subscriptions and found linked Twitter accounts. Actually following the Twitter users' accounts was voluntary, but this tool took a great deal of the discovery out of a migration effort.

I remember converting all of my feeds from Google Reader to Twitter in less than 30 minutes back in 2011 when I first built and released the tool. — While most of my subscriptions were on Twitter from then onward, I still kept about 4 or 5 websites that I followed frequently on Google Reader, such as Mac Rumors. This saved me from considerable distraction in checking these manually, and prevented the accidental rereading of posts on those websites when checking for new ones. (This is what RSS is great for!)

Reeder was a great app for using Google Reader on your Mac (it'd refresh once per hour and display an “unread stories” count on its icon in your Mac's Dock), but now that it's no longer working with the discontinued service, ReadKit is a promising alternative that works with other services rivaling Google Reader, such as Feedly. Check it out! 👍🏻