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TwitLinks: The Techmeme of Twitter?

Written by Richard MacManus / April 14, 2008 1:38 AM / 11 Comments

Just launched today is a new Twitter mashup called Twitlinks. This one aggregates the latest links posted to Twitter by tech industry pundits. The end result is a homepage that kind of resembles Techmeme, only without the threading of topics. It may even be the only news aggregator that is faster than Techmeme in delivering news, although I haven't tested that! (Techmeme is very fast and usually the first place that I discover tech news)

Twitlinks was created by Gary Brewer, who told us that one point of difference from Techmeme is that "as well as drawing links from the latest tech blogs, it also highlights some of the quirkier links these users post that would never see the light of day on sites such as techmeme."

Here's a simplified diagram of how it works:

Brewer told ReadWriteWeb that "I created TwitLinks based on the overwhelming amount of information that is posted on twitter." He said that he found himself "more interested in the links that people I didn't know personally published over their individual twitters, so to remove this noise the idea of twitlinks was born." Brewer says that TwitLinks is also available as an RSS feed, JSON, iPhone and Google Gadget.

Of course, removing the noise is what a lot of RSS and API powered mashups try to do these days, because there is so much noise in our RSS Readers, social networks, etc. Twitlinks will no doubt be accused of elitism, as Techmeme often is. But in reality Twitlinks looks like a neat app that delivers very fast tidbits of information from tech bloggers. It's not an earth-shattering app, but does a very effective job. It may well become a 'check multiple times a day' site for me, as Techmeme is.

Included are the ReadWriteWeb bloggers: rww (me), marshallk, catone, sarahintampa, alexiskold.


Comments

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  1. can any one give me any idea what is twitter and what we have to do there
    i have one twitter profile but don't know much about the twitter.
    thanks in advance
    this new service i think is tech part of twitter .

    Posted by: Ajay Pathak | April 14, 2008 2:08 AM



  2. Some guy is selling his twitter account on ebay now and it is getting high bids. Crazy stuff.

    ebay
    http://www.ebay.com

    Posted by: Sociapath | April 14, 2008 3:13 AM



  3. Interesting to compare TwitLinks and tweetmeme.

    Posted by: Igor Poltavskiy | April 14, 2008 6:57 AM



  4. At first look it seems much more like "here's the twitter feeds of the techmeme leaderboard presented nicely" than it is really an indication of "twitter conversations"...

    Posted by: Jeremy Toeman | April 14, 2008 8:05 AM



  5. So let me get this straight.

    Mashable or whatever tech blog writes an article. The article gets dumped into their rss feed and twitter is waiting in the wings to read that rss. Twitter gets the rss and creates a tweet.

    Then, twitter takes those tweets and outputs.... freaking rss.

    So couldn't this guy just get these posts directly from the original rss feed of the tech blogs? The answer of course is yes. Twitter has no use here and adds zero value.

    Twit...

    Posted by: Patrick | April 14, 2008 8:55 AM



  6. http://memegator.com has been doing this since before christmas!

    Posted by: Stewart Mercer | April 14, 2008 10:18 AM



  7. Posted by: luna | April 14, 2008 10:29 AM



  8. im open source lover

    Posted by: luna | April 14, 2008 10:30 AM



  9. kinda sucks :)

    i actually like http://www.tectrnd.com

    cheers

    Posted by: Vincent Nicolai | April 14, 2008 11:21 AM



  10. That service is same as http://tech.livecrunch.com just doing twitts instead of rss ... :)

    Cool stuff but i still like tech lc better.

    Posted by: Money Order | April 14, 2008 12:15 PM



  11. There is a new jaiku aggregator at http://jaiklinks.com

    Posted by: Jonas | April 29, 2008 4:08 AM



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