Tweetree Puts Actual Shared Content In Your Twitter Stream

One large component of the “RSS Is Dead” idea is that services like Twitter offer a faster and more curated way to share content. But the problem is that to do this on Twitter, it involves sharing a link to the content and not the content itself. Tweetree solves this — using RSS.

When you log in to Tweetree with your Twitter credentials, you’ll see your normal Twitter stream, but whenever anyone shares a link, Tweetree goes out and grabs the content on that page via its RSS feed and places it right in your stream. Long articles are placed in a frame that can be scrolled through. This is a seamless way to read a ton of content without having to leave your Twitter stream.

Of course, there’s still a couple problems with this. The biggest one is that a number of popular content sites use partial feeds. That basically means that Tweetree will pull in the opening snippet of the story, but you’ll still have to click through to the actual story to see it. Another potential issue is that many sites use Google’s Feedburner product for their RSS feeds. That service has a history of poor performance when it comes to RSS feeds, so it’s possible that when you share a link through Twitter, it won’t yet be on the RSS feed for that site, so Tweetree won’t be able to pull it in.

Tweetree also updates in real-time, using the Twitter Search method of letting you know when new tweets are available and asks you to click a button to refresh your stream. Another nice feature is that Tweetree actually pulls the background that you set up for Twitter, so it looks similar to how your stream looks on twitter.com. And you can send tweets from it, see your replies,direct messages and even search tweets.

We previously covered Tweetree back in December when it launched a way to thread Twitter conversations, to make them easier to follow. That worked to some effect, but this is a much more compelling idea. Now if we could just remove the RSS middle man from the equation, it’d be a great idea.

Learn more about it in the video below.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4951550&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Tweetree: web twitter client from Ryan Twomey on Vimeo.