BBC News via Twitter

Wednesday, 10 January 2007, 01:05

A second experimental Twitter mashup sends you BBC News headlines to you via SMS.

It’s already improving on last week’s CNN mashup by adding a web link to each post. Its creator, Mario Menti, explains.

Update: As Graham points out in the comments, the BBC News feed is a little overwhelming. Perhaps the next stage will be a site that lets users customise which news items they want to receive, perhaps using seperate Twitter accounts for different sections of a news site.

Entry Filed under: BBC, BBCbackstage, Mashups, Miscellanea, Twitter

Graham

I've looked at your Twitter Martin. Assuming you have all twitters fed through to your mobile phone and you have a fairly bog standard phone contract AND you have fairly limited memory on your phone, how long does it take for the SMS memory to fill up? Not very long I'm guessing. Mine filled within a day once without the BBC or any other newsfeeds. I blame Suw Charman, but I've since figured out how to turn her off. This is all useful stuff, but to be more useful there must be more intuitive ways of filtering the information.

Martin

I've given up on sending Twitter to mobile. The memory isn't a problem, but the battery drainage and annoyance from the constant buzzing of my phone on vibrate was driving me to distraction.

I use the RSS feed only — and it's nowhere near the top of my reading list.

Mario

Hi Martin - yes, you're not the only one who thought the twitter bot using the news front page feed was a bit overwhelming. I've added some additional bots for the main individual BBC news feeds, see here: http://menti.net/?p=89

Patrick Smith

Martin,
I find the BBC Twitter feeds really useful, especially when ouf of the office. It gives you a basic heads-up on what's going on, though I must agree the sheer volume of it is bordering on obscene.
Another thing - has anyone noticed quite how depressing the BBC England feed is? Every one is either a murder, fatal car crash or grizzly court case. It should lighten up a bit.