Turning Google+1’s (Plus Ones) into Tweets (re-enabling my share workflow in Google Reader)

Would it surprise you that since I’ve fallen out with Google Reader, we’re on a trail separation (I’m having a fling with Tiny Tiny RSS) that we’re back together again. We’ve got some new ground rules though, the main one being when I Google +1 a news item it should also hit my Twitter feed.

“How?” You might ask. Well it’s not through the Google+ API which currently omits +1 activity and there are no hidden RSS feeds on a persons +1’s page (that I’ve found anyway). No instead I’ve gone for a good old fashioned screen scrape.

Using this Google +1s to RSS (Reader to Twitter) Yahoo Pipe that I put together I can generate a basic RSS feed to put in the dlvr.it service to tweetout on my behalf. The main reason for going to this extreme is I liked having the share button on Google Reader that wasn’t device dependant which could be hooked up to other services.

If you want to do something similar here’s how (I should point out that I won’t be using this method myself as @fstoner has reminded me, that for now anyway, you can use ifttt.com to convert starred items into tweets)

1. On your Google Plus profile page click on +1’s in the tab and then ‘Edit Profile’ to make sure your that you ‘Show this tab on your profile’. While your here also take note of your Google+ user id which should be a long set of numbers your browser address bar e.g. https://plus.google.com/u/0/114662816634467534305/plusones
2. Visit the Google +1’s Pipe and insert your Google Plus ID, Run Pipe then copy the Get as RSS link (if you want to skip this step just replace the plusid in this link with your own http://pipes.yahoo.com/mhawksey/plusonestorss?_render=rss&plusid=114662816634467534305
3. Head over to dlvr.it and sign-in/register and Add Route specifying the RSS feed from above and then setup your Twitter account as the destination.

Some things to be aware of. This will tweet all your plus ones, not just those from Google Reader. To prevent timeouts the pipe only pulls the last 5 items. It ain’t full proof. Because Google shorten post titles the pipe gets the full title from the link so it may come a cropper with missing page titles and redirects.

Hopefully all this will soon be obsolete when a person’s +1s are accessible in the API.