Tag Archives: Read It Later

Saving tweeted items for later

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I get a ton of reading material through recommendations on Twitter. But Twitter has a few problems as a source of reading material (problems that, among other things, keep it from being the “RSS killer” that people like to yammer on about). Perhaps the most pressing problem is that my normal use of Twitter is more or less at odds with the way in which I like to consume reading materia online. Typically, for me, Twitter is a sort of attention dump: if I’m doing work that doesn’t require all of my attention (or if I’m doing work that is sufficiently boring that I don’t want to give it all my attention), I’ll often pour my excess attention into Twitter. Web reading, on the other hand (which for me is typified by the kind of reading I do in Google Reader or Read It Later) is usually quite different, in that I generally don’t multitask as I’m reading. As a result, I frequently see links in my Twitter stream that I’d like to look at but can’t at the moment.

There are a couple of different ways that I deal, or have dealt, with the problem of collecting Twitter recommendations for later.

  • Readtwit – There’s a service called Readtwit that collects every link from your Twitter stream and creates an RSS feed out of the linked items, which are also annotated with the name of the original linker and the text of the tweet containing the link. Subscribe to the link in your RSS reader, which presumably is a place much better suited for concentrating on reading.

    readtwit

    I used Readtwit for about a week before I had to give it up. The problem is volume. I follow enough people, some of whom send out a huge number of links, that I found myself sifting through literally hundreds of items every day – on top of the hundreds of items I receive from all my other RSS feeds on a daily basis. Making things worse, I was only interested in a very small percentage of the items being linked to. I was wearing out my j key in Google Reader.

    Readtwit provides a bit of filtering tools to prevent against overload. You can filter out links from certain individuals, or (I think) links in tweets containing certain text. If you’re following a relatively small number of people, and you think you’ll be interested in most of the links that they send out, then Readtwit might be a good option for you.

  • star

    Subscribing to my Favorite Tweets feed – Twitter creates an RSS feed for any individual’s favorite tweets (located at http://twitter.com/favorites/yourtwitterhandle.rss). When I read a tweet containing a link that I want to check out later, I favorite the tweet. I’ve subscribed to my favorites feed in Google Reader, and a few times per day I receive the tweets that I’ve most recently favorited.

    The huge advantage of this method over Readtwit is that it lets me select only those items that I want to read, instead of getting every linked item in my stream. And since the favorites function is part of Twitter itself, I can mark items in any Twitter client. (It’s especially handy when, for instance, someone links to a video or something that can’t be viewed on my phone – I favorite the tweet, and check the link out the next time I’m reading my feeds on a computer.)

    The downside: What ends up in Google Reader is not the content of the linked article, but only the tweet containing the ink. That’s fine when I’m reading feeds on the computer and can easily click on the link. But it’s not a great way for me to read things on my phone while I’m in transit, which is what I like to do with longer-form web stuff.

  • ril

    Read It Later – That’s where Read It Later comes in handy. It’s a Firefox extension and a web service that allows you to mark individual web pages for later reading. (Instapaper is similar.) I use the iPhone Twitter app Twittelator Pro primarily because it has the built-in ability to save things to Read It Later. As you see at the right, I can click a button that will scour the current tweet for links and send the linked items to my Read It Later list (which I can then read in Firefox or in the RIL iPhone app or on the Kindle, as I have geeked out on before).

My workflow ends up being a combination of (2) and (3). If the link contains mostly text and images (which can be viewed in the Read It Later iPhone app, where I do almost all my RIL reading), I send it to Read It Later. If it’s got video or audio or Flash, I favorite the tweet and check the link out when it arrives when I’m reading my feeds in Google Reader at a computer.

Getting Read It Later items to the Kindle

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Lately I’ve been using Read It Later as a sort of temporary-bookmarking system. Between my RSS feeds and my Twitter stream, I come across much more text than I can stop to read in the middle of the day, and Read It Later provides a pretty elegant combination of tools of saving these pages for later – a Firefox extension for marking pages and an iPhone app for reading them. An especially great feature of the RIL iPhone app is the way it handles offline reading. When I sync my list, it stores a copy of the source web page, which I can then either read in its original HTML form or after RIL applies its remarkably reliable text-extracting algorithm. In this way I get a lot of reading done while on the subway and away from internet access.

Read It Later on my Kindle

Read It Later on my Kindle

When I got a Kindle recently, I thought that it would be ideal to shift some of this long-form reading from the iPhone to the Kindle’s larger and easier-on-the-eyes screen. A bit of searching turned up Kindlefeeder, a website that will collate RSS feeds and send them as a single document either directly to your Kindle (incurring a $0.15 charge from Amazon) or to your email address, whence you can then transfer to the Kindle via USB. RIL provides feeds for a user’s reading list (here’s mine http://readitlaterlist.com/users/kachooney/feed/unread – you may have to edit your RIL privacy controls to make sure that your items feed is not password-protected). I plugged this feed into Kindlefeeder, but immediately ran up against a wall: RIL’s feed contained titles only. Since my goal was to make my reading list available offline, I needed full feeds.

This seemed like a job for Yahoo Pipes. (Bonus for me: I had never given YP more than a cursory glance in the past, so this was a good chance for me to learn the ropes, er, pipes.) The strategy: hand my RIL titles-only feed to YP, and tell YP to fetch the full text of each item and store it in item>description of a new RSS feed. Then, subscribe to the YP RSS feed with Kindlefeeder. Here’s a sample: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=3a0be51021240c9eda3541ce5041a29f.

You’ll notice that I’ve filtered out feed items pointing back to http://nytimes.com. That’s because the NYT (1) breaks up most articles into multiple pages, and (2) publishes pages that are uniform to submit to a single parse. NYT feeds are thus handled by a different pipe, one with a few extra steps. First, instead of calling up the item>link from the RIL feed, I get the printer-friendly version (so that it contains the entire article text on a single page). Second, I filter out the header and footer material (advertisements, navigation, etc.) with “cut content” under “Fetch Page”. If, in the future, I find myself sending a lot of items to RIL from another source with similarly uniform markup, I might create yet another filter to strip the extraneous content off.

The final snag in this setup: free Kindlefeeder accounts will not fetch RSS feeds created by Yahoo Pipes, because these feeds take so long to create and therefore put undue stress on Kindlefeeder’s servers. At $20/year, the ability to transport my reading list to the Kindle seemed worth it to buy a Kindlefeeder premium account. So congrats, Kindlefeeder – you got a customer out of me. (Another cost justification – it’s possible to use a similar process to fetch the entire contents of various magazines from the partial feeds they publish on their websites. $20/year is pretty cheap for unlimited magazine subscriptions on the Kindle.)

So go make some computer technologies of your own. Get out of the house and go do it!