3 Steps to publishing your iTunes recent listening on twitter
Twitter, Twitterfeed, last.fm mash
I’ve been using Twitter for over a year, but only actively for the last month or so. One thing I did recently was to have iTunes twitter my listening habits to my account which appears to have piqued some collective interest judging by the number of messages I get about it. Let me show you how.
To do this you will need: iTunes, a last.fm account with scrobbling, a Twitter account (obviously!) and an OpenID account such as Google Mail.
- Go to last.fm and set up a new account if you don’t have one. This is all free and brilliant — frankly, you need one anyway! Download the last.fm software — this will ‘listen’ to whatever you play on iTunes and scrobble it to the last.fm website.
- Next up, log in to twitterfeed.com using your OpenID. It’s likely that you already have a suitable ID for this site (complete list here). Once logged in, choose Go to my feeds or create a new one. Choose to create a new feed.
- Final Step! On the form, choose ‘twitter’ from the first dropdown list and enter your twitter details — then ask it to authenticate it. In the RSS feed URL field, enter
feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/XXXX/recenttracks.rss
where XXXX is your last.fm username. You can change how often you want the feed to appear on twitter on this page too. Don’t do it too often or you’ll upset your followers — once every 2 hours or so seems ok. In the ‘prefix each tweet with’, you might like to enter ‘is listening to ‘ to give your new tweet some context. Then hit the create button.
That’s it, you’re done. Your iTunes listening habits will now appear on twitter and your followers can see what you’re listening too. Great way to get more followers too — it’s remarkable how often I get comments and new followers based on this feed.
Once you’re comfortable with this process, try adding a flickr feed or a feed from your blog.
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