It is only natural that when you find something interesting in Google Reader (we talked about the benefits of Reader earlier). I have gone through a few different methods of sending these items to twitter. I have finally settled on a method. First I will tell you the shortfalls of different the different methods.
Google Reader – Sent To…
Google Reader added a little send to link that gives you the option to send the article to various different services, including twitter. This method sucks! I am not a fan of the fact that it opens a new window. It took about a day to eliminate this option.
Use An Auto Delivery Mechanism On Your Shared Items Feed
I used this for a little while. It worked pretty well, things that I shared made their way to twitter. It was clean simple and very convenient. What I found was that I didn’t want to tweet everything that I shared in Google Reader. I would end up with tweets that looked like:
photo… <some linke>
Ugly tweets, with things that weren’t always of interest to my twitter followers. As well I have 3 separate twitter accounts to keep things of interest separate from the individual followers, this really didn’t allow for posting to separate twitter accounts.
Final Solution
This final solution is a modification of the of the previous option.
Step 1: Create a tag for each twitter account. Tweet is the tag I use for my main twitter account.
Step 2: Share the feed for that tag. This is done in Reader Settings > Folders and Tags. Just click on the little RSS icon next to the feed to make it public.
Step 3: Get the feed from the tag public site. Just click View public page in the settings and get the feed url from there.
Step 4: Use one of the many feed propagators to auto tweet items from your tag feed. I have gone through quite a few: TwitterFeed.com, FeedBurner.com (there is a socialize feature buried in the settings) before settling on dlvr.it. dlvr.it is by far the most reliable of the three that I have tried.
If you repeat these steps for each of your twitter accounts you can easily tweet items to a specific twitter account.
Tagging items is very quick. When an item is open just hit ‘t‘ to open the tag box, then type in the tag corresponding to the twitter account you want to tweet it to.