Feb

13

Techmeme Mixes Up New RSS Feeds and Twitter Bots

February 13, 2008 |

Techmeme’s RSS feeds and Twitter bot have always been a bit in a bit of a sorry state when it came to getting info to reader quickly. The algorithm wouldn’t put items into the feed until they had archived a certain ‘importance’. Because of this, there was often a considerable delay between a story showing up on the site and it getting posted to the RSS feed and Twitter.

Now, however, Gabe Rivera has added a number of new feeds and Twitter options, called “Firehose RSS” and “Firehose Twitter,” which are going to add all items posted at Techmeme immediately after they are posted on the site (there are also similar feeds for Techmeme’s sister sites WeSmirch, memeorandum, and Ballbug):

The new “Firehose” feeds introduced today do just that. Any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which exclude “Discussion” links) will appear in the feed within 5 minutes. This means well over 100 headlines per day for Techmeme Firehose, so casual news readers will want to use the Main feed (i.e. the previous, standard feed) instead.

For news junkies like me, that’s a great new feature. Especially the fact that the new posts also get posted right to Twitter is going to make a huge difference for how I use Techmeme.

Just today I was wondering about how development on Techmeme seemed slow lately. Looks like Gabe still has a few surprises up his sleeve.


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