01 March 2012

Feedburner removes Socialize feature and ability to post to Twitter

Update - 02 March 2012
It is still possible to access "Socialize".

When you are in Feedburner, go to the Publicize tab, and the address looks like this: "http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/publicize?id=[a bunch of numbers i.e. the tab session key]"

Replace "publicize" with "socialize" in the url, and boom, you are in there. For example:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/socialize?id=bdd8995cgccqii6padfg821380

Thanks to Chris Pine for the above work around.

Original Post
It appears that Google Feedburner has removed its support for posting to Twitter. If you have read my previous blog posts you'll know that I made use of this feature extensively.

It's not clear why this feature has been removed or whether it's a permanent change. But it's definitely a feature that will be missed. I am hoping Google has temporarily hidden this feature away while they are working on fixing all the current problems with it.

If you know anything more about this, please let me know.

One reasons I used Feedburner for, was that it lets you choose how you want your YouTube videos to be posted to Twitter. If you enable the YouTube to Twitter feature on YouTube itself, the resulting tweets will look very spam like. In the sense that YouTube tries to insert a reference to its own twitter account for promotions as well as making a decision on what text your tweet will contains. By filling your 140 character limit with useless text. The automatic tweets from YouTube look something like this:

"I uploaded a @YouTube video http://youtu.be/OgQlY-MdTH8 [Funny] Atheist vs. Christian - Why don't people believe in God?"

This means YouTube is taking up 28 characters unnecessarily as well as placing the content link before the content title. Aside from this annoyance, there is no option to include hashtags in your Tweet via the default YouTube application.

Google Feedburner's "Socialize" feature on the other hand would let me post something like the text below:

"[Funny] Atheist vs. Christian - Why don't people believe in God? http://youtu.be/OgQlY-MdTH8 #atheist #atheism #religion"

As you can see in the above text I would be able convey the content from the beginning of the tweet instead of the end of a tweet. Also the hash-tags would give my tweet more publicity.

19 comments:

  1. It is still possible to access "Socialize". Here's how I did it.

    When you are in Feedburner, go to the Publicize tab, and the address looks like this: "http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/publicize?id=[a bunch of numbers]"

    Replace "publicize" with "socialize" in the url, and boom, you are in there.

    I also hope that this is temporary, because I like that feature as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the tip, it works as you said. So I'll be using this method for now ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jenson:

    Thanks for covering this. It's a feature I always use and just started my latest blog and was looking to add but have seen it has disappeared.

    Any ideas anyone when/if it's coming back - it was priceless.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not sure when/if it is coming back, but you can use the workaround for now. If I find out anything more on this, I will post a blog about. You can subscribe to the blog on the right hand side... top of the page.

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  4. Considering this, plus the fact that the great new statistic interface has disappear too (before was at feedburner.google.com/gfb/), I'm doubting what future Google has in mind for the GREAT FeedBurner service...

    Any thoughts?

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    Replies
    1. we'll see what happens but I hope the don't discontinue this product.

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  5. I use the socialize feature on Feedburner a lot. It makes publishing new blogs to twitter easy. However in the last few weeks some of the feeds have ceased to publish to twitter while others have continued as normal. I have tried the useful info given on the site and although everything is as before some have stopped while others are working as normal. I hope Google sort this out or give a viable alternative soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have had similar problems with Feedburner for over a year. Sometimes tweets are sent other times they are not sent. It seems rather random, however I don't think these two issues are related. Unless they have taken the feature offline in order to fix it for us then bring it back.

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  6. Awesome...I was stressing out trying to find out what happend to socialize...thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you so much, It was beginning to drive me crazy!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. you're welcome. I'm glad it was useful ;)

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  8. Thank you so much, It was beginning to drive me crazy!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Fantastic. I asked this question on Twitter and no-one seemed to know the answer. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm glad it was of use to you. thanks ;)

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  10. not working again, any ideas?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. which part is not working? finding the socialize tab or the auto-posting to twitter?

      if auto-posting to twitter stops working, you can try using the website ifttt.com they have an easy way to do it.

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    2. auto post to twitter. im using dlvr.it instead

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    3. auto post @ twitter, not working any more. Im using dlvr.it instead

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