Launchpad now on Twitter and identi.ca!

You can now follow Launchpad news and other updates through Twitter and identi.ca!

For news and status updates, take a look at:

Brad‘s also running an experiment using TwitterFeed to give us:

TwitterFeeds takes the Atom feed of all bug reported against the Launchpad project and turns it into a stream of microblog posts.

Putting your project’s bugs into identi.ca or Twitter

If you track your project’s bugs in Launchpad, you can also turn them into an indeti.ca or Twitter stream. Similarly, you can create a stream of your project’s code branches, latest revisions or announcements!

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Create an identi.ca or Twitter account — something like yourprojectbugs.

Step 2: Visit your project’s overview page in Launchpad and copy the relevant Atom feed URL.

Getting the Atom feed address

Step 3: Log into TwitterFeed using your OpenID.

Step 4: Give TwitterFeed the Atom feed and your identi.ca or Twitter account details.

And you’re done!

Let us know how you find our first steps in microblogging Launchpad.

Update: The instructions above now cover using TwitterFeed with laconi.ca based services, such as identi.ca. It’s also worth noting that TwitterFeed supports a maximum of five updates every 30 mins so this may not be ideal if you want to ensure you get comprehensive coverage.

10 Responses to “Launchpad now on Twitter and identi.ca!”

  1. Chuck Says:

    I’m disappointed.

    Why are you choosing to focus this project with a closed source system such as Twitter rather than making the primary platform of the messaging an open system such as laconi.ca?

    Going with Laconi.ca gives developers the option to run on identi.ca with their bugs account or run their own server. Others on any laconi.ca installation can subscribe and use as they will.

    Going with Twitter and forcing F/OSS devs and users to create an account on and use a closed source system just feels wrong when there is a strong and viable F/OSS alternative.

    At least with Launchpad we were told early on that it would [eventually] become a F/OSS project at a mature point. Twitter, afaik, has made no such intention known.

    [Feature request for the blog: Add OpenID logins to comment with]

  2. Matthew Revell Says:

    Hi Chuck,

    No one’s forcing anyone to use Twitter. The bug feeds are Atom feeds and so an open format. It just happens that we came across TwitterFeed.com, which converts an Atom feed into Twitter posts, and thought it’d be an interesting little experiment. Brad and I thought it’d be cool to share our experience of that. If you know of something that converts Atom feeds into identi.ca posts, please share it with us.

    We’re posting our news updates to identi.ca as well as Twitter and I can’t see any reason why all the same information wouldn’t be available in other forms, such as this blog. So, I’m not sure I see a problem here.

    Matthew.

  3. John Drinkwater Says:

    n.b. Twitterfeed supports laconi.ca hosts as well.

  4. Matthew Revell Says:

    Thanks for that John! I’ll update the blog post to reflect that.

  5. LaserJock Says:

    Wow, this is fantastic! Especially for small projects with a single or maybe a few developers I can see this as a really nice way to show what’s going on. I’m not sure I’d want to get subscribed to all of Ubuntu’s bugs on twitter/identi.ca though 😉

    Thanks especially for the twitterfeed howto, most helpful.

  6. Chuck Says:

    Hi Matt,

    Sorry for the confusion with my initial response.

    First the word ‘forcing’ was a poor choice. I was thinking more ‘encouraging’ and don’t know why forcing came out.

    Like you and Brad, this was my first experience checking out twitterfeed. When I saw the option to switch between twitter and laconi.ca servers on the input page I had to guess that the choice to use twitter for the feeds in your instructions was a choice of popularity of the site.

  7. Matthew Revell Says:

    Hi Chuck – I’ve updated the post. I didn’t realise that TwitterFeed supports identi.ca.

  8. Michael Says:

    Cool! Now that we have all these new ways to subscribe to such things, can we have a single way to subscribe to new blueprints now? 🙂 For developers of small projects like myself I really really really want to be able to be notified when new blueprints are created. Right now it is a pain to go to the blueprints page every so often and try to see which ones are new. It would really help projects and developers get more in touch with what users are requesting.

  9. Brad Crittenden Says:

    Thanks Chuck and John for the extra information regarding TwitterFeed and laconi.ca. When I first set up the Twitter account for the bugs feeds I was disappointed to find it did not support laconi.ca so I could only set it up for Twitter. I checked back a time or two but hadn’t noticed that they now support laconi.ca.

  10. Alan Pope Says:

    Nice idea.

    Had a play and created these for tracking new bugs in ubuntu:-

    http://twitter.com/ubuntubugs
    http://identi.ca/ubuntubugs .

    Not sure they will be able to keep up as twitterfeed only updates every 30 mins and posts 5 bugs. I suspect there are more bugs than that filed in Ubuntu, especially at peak times.

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