Instant tweets: Twitterfeed goes Real-time

Twitterfeed, the service that automatically tweets links to your new blog posts, has launched a significant upgrade.

As one of the first wave of third-party services to spring up around Twitter, Twitterfeed saw huge adoption in its early days. Unfortunately, this led to some severe problems with reliability.

Sometimes links to new blog posts would be delayed by hours, some times they would never appear at all. Just yesterday the service was reportedly spewing out old links to users’ Twitter accounts. It’s no surprise that some people abandoned the service altogether and reverted to tweeting manual links.

Now Twitterfeed is turning over a new leaf. With today’s upgrade the service has been re-coded to be more robust and reliable. Not only that but it’s going real-time too. If your blog uses the PubSubHubbub real-time publishing service a tweet should be sent from your Twitter account pretty much as soon as you click the ‘Publish’ button on a new post. Rival real-time service RSSCloud will also be supported soon too.

These days, publishing to Twitter isn’t enough. As the success of Posterous has shown, people like to publish their content to multiple services. While Twitterfeed isn’t quite matching the 25 services supported by Posterous. but it will now allow you to publish to Facebook as well as Twitter.

Finally, Twitterfeed is also introducing Google Analytics integration. With the big names like CNN and the White House amongst its userbase, this is likely to be a popular feature. It will allow tracking of clickthrough numbers so you can see the full path users take from a Twitter or Facebook link, onwards through your site.

If you’ve previously abandoned Twitterfeed, it might be time to take a look at it again.