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Rebroadcasting tweets with Ping.fm using Yahoo Pipes and RSSFWD

So the premise is pretty simple. Ping.fm is a service that allows you to send status updates to multiple services like facebook, myspace, twitter, plurk and pownce by emailing a secret address. I really like the service but I’m also having trouble completely adopting the usage in my day to day.

Twitter seems to be more convenient for me, especially with all of the third party apps for it like TwitterBerry. What I’d like to do is continue using twitter as I do and also have some of my tweets rebroadcast to my other social networks using ping.fm. I don’t want to rebroadcast my @replies since those aren’t generally about what I’m doing.

I figured this would be a great project for Yahoo Pipes. I was able to quickly make a pipe that pulls in the RSS feed from my twitter account and clean it up. The first Regex operator removed the “hak5darren: ” prefix from the messages. I know it’s not elegent but it works.

A neat feature of ping.fm that isn’t very publicized is that it ignores anything following and including four consecutive dashes. Using the Regex operator I was able to append “—-end” to the tweets in the feed. This will come into play a little later.



Lastly in the Yahoo Pipe I set a filter operator to block any items that begin with @. This removes @replies which would be out of context on other social networks. Finally the pipe is output to an RSS feed called tweet redirect.

Running the pipe I’m quite happy with the project so far but I still need a way to get the newly cleaned up tweets out of RSS and into emails destin to my secret ping.fm address. Yahoo has an alert service which will send new items in the feed via email but the messages are in HTML and not easy to work with.

After looking around for a simple RSS to Email service I came across RSSFWD.com which does exactly as the domain implies. You give the site a feed and an email address and you’ll get the option of doing HTML or plain text emails, immediate deliveries or daily/weekly digests.



This is where it gets a little sticky. RSSFWD doesn’t require you to sign up for an account to use the service but when you setup a RSS to Email forward it sends a subscribe email with a unique link that must be clicked to activate the forwarding service. Obviously I can’t have it email directly to ping.fm else I’ll miss the unique url and be unable to activate the service.

At this point in my retweeting adventure I was getting pretty tired and as a duct-tape fix decided to use Gmail to forward the forwarded RSS feeds. I signed up for the RSS forwarding service to my Gmail account, received the activation email and clicked the confirmation link, and setup a filter to forwarded any new messages from RSSFWD.com to Ping.fm.



In theory all of this works. And after my initial tests I can say it does exactly as you would expect. Yahoo Pipes grabs my tweets and cleans ‘em up. RSSFWD pulls in the cleaned up feed and spits it out to Gmail. Gmail gets the emails and ships ‘em off to Ping.fm. And Ping.fm sends my tweets off to Facebook, Myspace, Pownce, and Plurk. But alas I am not in social networking status updating heaven.

Yahoo Pipes and RSSFWD are SLOW!

Still, not bad for an hour of hackery in the middle of the night, right? At least now I’ve got the proof of concept down and can start looking at ways to do this properly.

At the moment I’m thinking of using PHP, which has built in RSS, Regex, and Mail functions to process the tweets and ship ‘em off directly to Ping.fm. With a cron job running the script every N minutes I think it might be a viable solution.

The only problem is my PHP-fu isn’t quite what it used to be. I’ll keep my blog updated as I progress on this project. I’d love to hear what the code monkeys out there think.