Google announced in a blog post yesterday that it has added a new ‘socialize’ feature to its RSS feed publishing service FeedBurner, that allows users to post their latest blog entries on to Twitter. A bit like what Twitterfeed does or is meant to do at the moment.
For the past few months we have used Twitterfeed to herald new blog posts by Speed staff using the @speedcomms Twitter feed, but recently we have experienced problems with Twitterfeed’s service going down quite regularly. So we are now experimenting with Google’s service.
The ‘socialize’ feature uses Google’s new URL shortening service named goo.gl to push blog posts out on Twitter almost instantly. If also offers a couple of interesting options that are above and beyond what Twitterfeed currently offers. It allows users to turn the keywords that they have tagged their blog post with into hashtags, which can help more people to discover your tweets and blog posts by using Twitter Search. The service can also reduce the size of your tweet, making it small enough for other users to retweet and share with their followers.
But there do seem to be a few teething problems at the moment. As not all blog posts are tagged with keywords, some blogging platforms such as WordPress tag them with ‘uncategorized’. Currently Google classes this as a proper keyword and has been tagging tweets with the #uncategorized hashtag.
Will scores of users now migrate from Twitterfeed to Google? Only time will tell, but I suspect that many users will give the new service a try the next time that Twitterfeed goes down.
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I’m a student at the university of Westminster, U.K. and this is my PR blog@http://bit.ly/a8Uxcn