Readtwit May Reenergize Twitter for Me

I’ve been pretty burned out on Twitter lately. Its popularity has brought droves of spammers and marketers, a bit too chatty and self-promotional for my tastes.

I know, social media and self-promotion are like peanut butter and jelly. Let’s just say, Twitter isn’t as small and cozy as it used to be.

One of the most valuable aspects of Twitter for me has always been finding, sharing and discussing information in the form of links. Read something interesting? Tweet it and discuss.

There’s so much information on the internets that having a filter of people you trust or at least find interesting yields tons of cool stuff you wouldn’t find without their help. Essentially, it’s crowdsourcing your browsing and information gathering.

The problem with Twitter has always been controlling the noise, and lately, it’s deafening. Add to that the curse of the URL shortener that masks the original link, making it impossible to know where you’re going when you click.

So, finding those nuggets becomes a needle-haystack exercise.

Enter Readtwit (h/t ReadWriteWeb), an ingenious little app that scrapes the tweets with links out of your following stream and delivers them via a feed for your consumption.

But wait, there’s more.

In addition to delivering a feed, Readtwit resolves the URL-shortened links and provides a summary (or detailed) view of the link. Oh, and it removes duplicate links and includes some basic filtering. Pretty freaking sweet.

I tested Readtwit for my personal (@jkuramot) and team (@theappslab) accounts, and in both cases, the feeds were quickly compiled and delivered to Google Reader. Readtwit uses Twitter’s OAuth implementation, the right way to integrate with Twitter, so no worries about where your credentials go.

Here’s an example of how it works:

• @theappslab follows Chet (@oraclenerd).
• Chet tweets a link.
• Readtwit updates the feed in Google Reader, like so:

Nice.

There are a couple hiccups I don’t yet understand. For instance, I didn’t get the link from Chet in my @jkuramot feed, although I follow him from that account. I also didn’t get the link that Rich tweeted earlier about his fix for Skype on Snow Leopard. Not really sure why.

Even so, Readtwit is a great little app that will definitely help me filter out interesting links from my noisy tweet streams.