Since Google rolled out its latest changes in Google Reader, we’ve seen a fair number of complaints on the Internet, and if you’re one of those people who is looking for an alternative, we came across an interesting option this morning.
Instead of hunting for another RSS reader which looks and feels like Google Reader, why not take a completely different route and ditch your RSS reader, and use Twitter instead.
Most of the major sites and blogs you follow are bound to have Twitter accounts, where they share each and every article that you’ve been reading in Google Reader, and Ben Guild has come up with an easy way to get those subscriptions out of Google Reader and right into your Twitter feed.
With Ben’s Twitter Migration and Networking Tool, all you need to do is sign in to Twitter, download your Google Reader subscriptions OPML file, and the web app will do the rest, by extracting each site and finding it’s Twitter account, and in some cases, even the personal Twitter accounts of the people behind the site.
Ben provides a direct link to your OPML file in the service, but if you want to get it straight out of your reader – go to Reader Settings, click the Import/Export tab and scroll down to the table, to download your subscriptions.
You can then manually follow the accounts of your choice, or better yet, create lists as a way of keeping your Twitter feed neat and tidy. If you use a service like Tweetdeck, you can even receive notifications when new updates come in, so you’re sure not to miss a thing.
It might be slightly tedious having to do it all manually, but it does give you a chance to review each account and make sure you want to follow it or add it to a list.
Now there is one major caveat to using TMNT – it can only extract details on sites that are not organized into folders. If you’re planning on ditching Google Reader anyway, you could always delete your folders or tags in Google Reader’s settings, which won’t affect your subscriptions.
There’s no denying that this is a wildly different solution to an RSS reader, and some may find it a lot less convenient, since you don’t get previews of articles on Twitter. On the other hand, with this method, you have one less app to worry about, and can get a lot more out of Twitter than you already do.
If you’re planning on sticking with Google Reader but do want to keep up with your favourite sites and blogs on Twitter as well, you could always take the somewhat roundabout route and import your OPML file into another Google account, delete the folders or tags, and then go through the process described above.
Would you consider using Twitter instead of Google Reader? Let us know in the comments.



















I have been using Bloglines for some time now for a particular group of feeds. It seems to work for me quite well. I am also not happy with the recent changes to the Google Reader, but I am just not sure what I will do. This was my favorite, but it just slipped a few notches after this recent change.
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LikeOR just use Feedly.
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LikeThis is a nice idea, I suspect many of us already follow the key sites on Twitter that we were following their feeds on Google Reader. There are some problems with this method though: Many people follow thousands of RSS feeds - so many that most users will bump into Twitters limits (you can't follow more than the number that follow you, plus about 200). Another issue is that Twitter is real-time - Google Reader feeds are consumed in "my time".
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LikeI agree with previous posters. I have saved posts in google reader for years. I cannot use twitter for that, however, the postpost service with twitter is the beginning of a solid archival tool. Or use twitter + ifttt.com in order to archive and save tweets.
Why not review other RSS readers that might replace Google Reader? For example, I am using feedly right now as my alternative.
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Likegood info. its interesting.
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LikeAwesome! Very useful, thanks.
#GFail
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LikeAs long as you can't mark a tweet 'read', I can't see how Twitter should replace RSS.
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LikeSAME, it's not the same. But I hope Google get's their mistakes with posts like this.
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LikeI can only second what James Gardner said, Readers and Twitter are entirely different beasts and cannot replace each other.
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LikeSimple answer is no. They're two completely different things in my mind, and it really comes down to data storage. Twitter is okay if your online, but it's very hard to go back through Tweets to find information you may have missed. Readers (of any sort, not just Google Reader) give you the ability to look at the information in your own time, not just at the moment it is published, storing the the articles up for you in a more structured, searchable format. I'll continue to use both.
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LikeJames Gardner That's interesting - and I guess it really depends on how you use Google Reader. I personally don't see each and every post in there - there's just too much to read - for my purposes as a blogger what matters most to me is what's happening real time when I'm online. If there's a site that I'm particularly interested in and know I'll get something out of almost all of their posts - I make a point of going to the site itself.
I think it only really becomes a problem if you're offline for days on end since Twitter is searchable as well - especially if you use a third party service like SnapBird.
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LikeI have to agree with James and others here. I use both Reader and Twitter, and follow many of the same people on Twitter as I do in my RSS feed, but it's not the same.
It's not a question of reading every post in Reader; it's an issue of being able to pick through, in your own time, what you find interesting, which is incredibly difficult to do in Twitter. If you missed it when it was posted on Twitter, how are you supposed to know it even exists? There's no way I'm scrolling through a long Twitter feed to find something that may or may not even be there. With an RSS feed, you can see that it's unread and cherry-pick the posts you're interested in. It's not that I want to read every post on a particular blog.
And honestly, I'd rather just see the blog post itself in an RSS feed, instead of an often-cryptic 140-character summary in Twitter.
Going to the site itself is useful, but the very point of an RSS feed is to aggregate all this information together in a clear, organized way. Twitter is great for live information, but in my view it is in no way a replacement for an RSS feed.
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LikeConversation from Twitter
ypetrova за съжаление има доста feed-ове които нямат tiwtter
Heth мъничка частична алтернатива :)