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twitter + delicious -> twitticious

One of the things I’ve been lamenting about twitter is that it’s replaced del.icio.us as the “place where I put interesting links” … ie. links my friends might be interested in. This means that I don’t really have a good, structured repository of links like I used to have with delicious. The problem is that twitter and delicious do a similar thing – let you share information – from a totally different philosophical starting point.

Delicious is a database designed to collect and organize URLs, which you can also share.

Twitter is a conversational tool, that also allows you to share URLs.

So delicious is built as an organizable archive; while twitter is built as an ephemeral transmission device.

But what I’ve found is that I want to do both: transmit interesting links, but *also* archive them for future reference. So I want to link the two services. I asked on Twitter if anyone knew how; Jordan (blogtwitter) pointed me to twitticious (review), by Alex Girard which, I think, does exactly what I want, unfortunately with some problems, but the meat of what I want twitticious does:

1. I post a URL to twitter, with a bit of text
2. twitticious then sends that post to delicious, with the twit text as the title, and the URL as the URL

I now am able to transmit my twits, and archive the URLs in a nicely structured/able database.

It’s so simple. And all you have to do to get it to work is:
-give twitticious your twitter name
-give twitticious your delicious name/password (hopefully notprobably too much of a security threat).

Problem 1: the delicious entries aren’t tagged, so you have to do that in a separate step.
Potential Solution: have twitticious automatically tag: “from:twitter” … so I can easily find & tag those entries

Problem 2: twitticious uses the twitter’s tinyurl as the URL it posts to delicious
Potential solution: could the true URL be extracted and posted instead?

Problem 3: Apparently it can’t be turned off
Potential Solution: you could just change your delicious pw, and that should do the trick, I think.

UPDATE: Problem 4: The password thing. Probably too much of a security threat.
Potential solution: I don’t know.

(PS what do you think gives the CIA more information: my Facebook account or my del.icio.us account?)

11 Comments

  1. Boris Anthony Boris Anthony 2008-04-09

    1- you are not lamenting twitter or delicious. you are whining about your own behavior and usage of those services.

    2- you are whining about one service not doing the job of the other service, hence forgetting “small pieces loosely joined”

    3- you are seeking to commit that most horrid social network act of cross posting your “content” across multiple services, effectively spamming all your friends, across contexts. (assuming, as many who don’t get it do, that if I follow your tweets I *must* want to see yur bookmarks and your blog posts and your presence information and your pictures and and and and… get a facebook account why don’t you? ;p

    where does it end Hugh McGuire, where does it end?

    ;)

  2. Hugh Hugh 2008-04-09

    1. yes; I am also seeking a hack/tool that will address my usage desires, which I think is usually the base principle of design, right? to make useful things that help people do the things they want/need to do?

    2. no, i am whining about wanting to do both things at once. i am wishing to join those loose pieces. i want to archive my linked URLs in a structured way, without having to do everything twice.

    3. i suspect you are the only person who (might) follow both my delicious & my twits. i use delicious more for myself; twitter more for friends. if that leads you to de-friend me in one or the other or both, then all the better for you if that’s a better use for you, of my online time.

    to repeat, generally i’m using twitter to communicate and delicious to archive (for myself). I want to be able to do both at once, instead of having to do both separately. Is that so wrong? so the impulse on the delicious side has nothing to do with wanting to better “broadcast” myself in social networks, but only to better use (for myself) that which I am broadcasting.

    and I think that’s where it ends.

    I worry Boris, that you don’t understand how people wish to use these tools, because that’s not how you want to use them ;-)

  3. Tri Nguyen Tri Nguyen 2008-08-19

    Try the Mahalo Follow extension for Firefox. When you use it to post a link to Mahalo, it lets you tag the content, describe it in 100 characters, and cross-post it to a few key web services. I typically post to Delicious and Twitter! The only problem? Recently I’ve had trouble getting it to post (perhaps some congestion at Mahalo’s end).

  4. Hugh Hugh 2008-08-22

    i want to go the other direction. i want to post to twitter (or identica) and cross post to a link archive.

  5. Tri Nguyen Tri Nguyen 2008-08-23

    Sorry, I meant the Mahalo Share extension. Did you actually try it? It’s the only thing I know that’ll give you the end-result that you want, if not the exact workflow that you desire.

    In other words, you’ll get: The shortened URL in Twitter, the full URL in Delicious; the “bit of text” you enter becomes your tweet that you share in Twitter, and your title in Delicious; you can add tags that end up in Delicious. Also, you needn’t abandon your regular Twitter posting tool: only use Mahalo Share when you want to share a link that goes both to Twitter and to Delicious.

    It doesn’t support Identi.ca yet.

    Of course, instead of posting to Twitter first and then cross posting to Delicious, like you want, you have to use the Mahalo Share tool which posts to Mahalo (I just ignore this) and also posts to Twitter and to Delicious simultaneously.

    All that said, a programmer could write the tool that does what YOU’VE described, except a Tweet does not have any tags, does it? You’ll always have to add them at some point (Mahalo Share lets you add them at the front end). Also, to write to Delicious you’ll always need to give up your username/password.

  6. nooe nooe 2008-09-20

    That`s what I`m looking for also.
    In the space where there are manyt multilanguage users.
    I need some tools for mix the way of communication.

  7. Andrew Andrew 2008-10-28

    Hey Hugh, at our company, Spheric.ca, we all post useful and important links to our @spheric twitter account. We also have a http://delicious.com/spheric account that we wanted to do like you, have our tweets show up in delicious. One of our team members David Chan (http://twitter.com/chandavid) wrote a simple php script to fix this issue for us. You can find out more at our blog, http://blogs.spheric.ca/

    Please check it out and let us know if this what you are looking for. We have several more cool internal tools we are working on like this that I’m sure would help fill other voids.

  8. giselediaz giselediaz 2009-09-16

    Yes, the most important achievements for social media cross-posting would be for me:
    1. Tagging post in a single place and show this tags in every social media you chose to post. As Tri Nguyen said Malaho does and Andrew said Spheric does. I ll try and will post my comments.
    2. Tagging when you post from mail, without login anywhere. To do so you have to set all your services in one single place. You can choose to post the same thing in every social media. And you can send the same post to Twitter, Delicious, Slideshare, another blog and not to Facebook and Flickr, for example. http://posterous.com/autopost let you do so…without tagging everywhere. They said they will work on that. Ask for it if you are interested.

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