Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King‘s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

  • Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
  • Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

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