Friday 7 June 2013

Boycott Twitter - Acquiring Feeds TOO Difficult

I won't really boycott Twitter but I'll definitely omit Twitter feeds from Futuristic Reader. It is a shame I often feel the need to embed Tweets, embedded Tweets are very useful, is it is shame Twitter couldn't also provide an useful feeds option, I don't enjoy depending on disrespectful services. Twitter is making it very difficult and perhaps impossible to obtain a feed, this is the problem. Formerly it was very easy to obtain a Twitter feed, you merely adjusted the Twitter URL to the search term or profile you wanted, but now it seems you need a write a JSON App and then convert the App to RSS.


The problem is Twitter is retiring API 1.0 on the 11th of June, according to engadget, which I only discovered towards the end of building this FR site. On 6th of June the Twitter API 1.0 suffered a blackout (death-throes) ahead of the June 11th end. I have asked around a few places to see if there was an easy solution but it seems not.

Anyway if a social network makes it difficult to share information, in this case via feeds, then I am very disinclined to favour that network with my time and energy. Walled gardens, limits, restrictions, or obstacles regarding sharing, it is anti-social, it is the antithesis of being social, social is all about sharing therefore even if I could implement a Twitter feed, I have decided not to. I am actually thankful for Twitter's hypocritical anti-social stance becuase the additional reddit feeds I've added are better quality than the initial Twitter feeds had intended to use:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=artificial%20intelligence
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Singularity
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=3D%20Printing
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Stem%20Cell
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Robotics
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=nanotechnology

Phew! Here are some feeds, or resources, I was unsure about including or decided not to include:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/rss
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/technology-lab
http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/Gizmag
Ro-bots or http://gizmodo.com/tag/robotics/rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/smithsonianmag/ideas  Possible
http://feeds.feedburner.com/smithsonianmag/science-nature/technology-space
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/rss-directory.htm
http://www.onlinedegreeprograms.com/blog/2010/100-best-rss-feeds-to-follow-science-news/
http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1019
http://feeds.latimes.com/latimes/news/science
http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/technology/rss
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/topic/biology.feed
http://www.scientificamerican.com/page.cfm?section=rss
http://rss.sciam.com/sciam/extremetech
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_space.rss
http://rss.sciam.com/sciam/computing  Possible 
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/topic/biology.feed
http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/feed/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/index.rss
http://hplusmagazine.com/category/singularity/feed/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mit/news-homepage
http://motherboard.vice.com/rss

Finally I'd like to fit in the feed for Robert Scoble's YouTube uploads, but I'm unsure where to fit it:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/Scobleizer/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&client=ytapi-youtube-profile