I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses Twitter’s favourites button as a “read later” service and wishes they would do more with it.
I figured since there’s no RSS support from Twitter now, if I could at least get the favourites into a feed I could import it into Google Reader or even back into WordPress with a plugin it would make them immediately more useful to me. There are lots of options once we’ve got a feed and it only takes a few minutes to register a couple of accounts with some already great apps but once you’re done you get something potentially useful you can then do more with! Bear in mind this is a workaround I’ve found that suits how I use (and want to use) my own Twitter favourites. I’m sure there is a more graceful way but this does at least work so feel free to either make use or suggest something different.
Got Flipboard? Read Adam Montague’s easier way for that particular app.
So … in order to grab your Twitter favourites as an RSS feed you need to be using the awesome If This Then That. That creates a task that connects to, and shares data with your Instapaper account where you can then grab an RSS feed you can work with.
1. Your Twitter favourites - Just save them as normal.
2. Create a “recipe” at IFTT (If This, Then That)
For the sake of convenience, here’s the recipe you need for this part. You’ll need both an IFTTT and Instapaper account. (If you don’t currently have an IFTTT account I recommend signing up even if you don’t want to use this particular post for anything. It looks like it’s got the potential to be a great service for lots of passing around of data in this sort of way)
3. Sign into Instapaper and grab your feed
Now all we’ve done so far is create our accounts on IFTTT and Instapaper (Instapaper is purely used because it provides a feed. I’m sure there are other similar services too) and set up a “recipe” on IFTTT and we’ve managed to convert our Twitter favourites into RSS format. I did try importing straight into Google Reader from IFTTT but unfortunately we seem to need this middle step as the closest recipe we can muster on IFTTT was one that tried to subscribe to any feeds that belonged to a the first link in your favourite. That soon got out of hand when I favourited a tweet and it subscribed me to the RSS feed of the site in that tweet. Doesn’t take many favourites for that to spiral to thousands of entries in Google Reader. Instapaper gives you an RSS feed for your page in the footer, just copy the RSS feed link and do what you want with it. I import into Google Reader simply by adding it as a subscription. You can end the process here and walk away with your RSS feed prize if you want, that’s really all there is too it. However, just for finality …..
4. A Google Reader feed of Twitter Favourites
The nice thing with the feed now is through IFTTT I can set some parameters so I get a “title” for my favourite, the text and any links and then a link to the tweet itself. I can see this being useful if I want to pull the feed into WordPress as I do with all my tweets which I use as a searchable archive. Just having favourites would be good and I could also use this setup to catch things I retweet as well so IFTTT looks like a great service if you’ve not already seen it, check it out.
Limitations
Can’t seem to set IFTTT task to go to a specific Instapaper folder. As Instapaper in my case is purely a middle-man in this process, it might be worth setting up a seperate Instapaper Tweets account if you already use Instapaper and don’t want your feed cluttering up.