Twitter Improvements

For those of you using FeedBlitz and Twitter, we've made a few key changes to the way we handle Twitter - and it's become simpler to sign up and easier to manage once you do. As one of the first services to integrate Twitter into our capabilities, we now have a lot of experience to apply to this particular mashup.

For starters, where there used to be two different versions of Twitter on the subscription form, there's now just one, called simply "Twitter." This option sends tweets to you using the "direct message" functionality of Twitter, and does not update any followers you may have. So there's no risk of updating all your followers with all your subscriptions, which has been an issue for some subscribers in the past.

The option to update your followers has been temporarily hidden - it was (is) a tool to allow bloggers to automatically micro blog (or re-blog) their content to Twitter without having to fret about formatting etc. This option was confusing to subscribers, but since it's useful it will shortly be making an appearance (or perhaps a reappearance) in publishers' Newsletter Centers. The functionality will still work great for those currently using it; it's simply no longer on the subscription form.

Finally, unsubscribing from our Twitter options could be a challenge, especially for those who elected not to associate their Twitter IDs with an email address that they could later use to log in to FeedBlitz with. Problem solved! The support page now has links to FeedBlitz login forms that let you log in to FeedBlitz using your Twitter credentials instead of an email address, and from there gives you an automatically generated subscription center for all your updates that generate tweets. Once in, a couple of clicks lets you suspend or re-enable a Twitter subscription, making unsubscribing from your FeedBlitz generated Twitter updates a snap.

Tweet on!