Reader2Twitter needs your help

In the past few days, Reader2Twitter has met some difficulties and I wrote a blog post to  explain it. 3 days before, I've solved the problem temporally and now Reader2Twitter and Buzz2Twitter are working well again. Thanks for all your support during these days. And I want to get more help from you :) Here is what you can do:

1.Suggest what Reader2Twitter can do.   

If you have any good idea about Reader2Twitter, please let me know. You can reply to @gr2t or @lookon on Twitter. And you can email me through areyoulookon#gmail.com

2.Help to make Reader2Twitter profitable

Reader2Twitter needs little money for working. Thanks for Google App Engine's low price. But as I explained in Reader2Twitter's difficulties, I am now in China and cannot pay the money because google checkout is not supported there. And I have no paypal account. So if you can help me "get" $10 a year, please suggest me or tell me. And if you can make reader2twitter making more money, tell me or doing it yourself~ 

3. develop Reader2Twitter with me

If you are a python programmer, and you have interest in Reader2Twitter, please contact with me :) I'd like to work with you.

I will make Reader2Twitter more stable and add more feature to the service in the future. Please RT this article or introduce Reader2Twitter to your friends, thanks :)

Difficulty of Reader2Twitter

Hi, Reader2Twitter users! Thanks for your support in the past days. I know that a lot of users are pleased with the sync speed and G2T's features. 10 hours before, G2T stopped working. Sorry for that and I am trying to figure out the problem. Here I want to explain with you what cause G2T down.

Reader2Twitter uses Google's great service, App Engine. It will cost nothing to develop an app on this platform, unless your app reach the quota. For an App Engine app, the free quota for datastore is 1GB, which is huge for a small app. Reader2Twitter was once a small app and it was just for me :) And I made it public, so you can use it now. But with the growing of users, the datastore is increasing. Here is the figure of datastore usage for R2T:

_2010-04-13_02

As you can see, the app has reached the free quota. So I need to pay for the datastore. However, as a Chinese, I cannot use the payment system by Google. China mainland is not in the list of paying countries. And Google tells me that there is no solution for this currently. So I am now trying my best to deal with such a problem. Sorry for the inconvenience and R2T will not work until I solve it.

Here is two ways for me to solve the problem:

1.Try to pay the cost
I am trying to apply for a HongKong visa card to use Google Checkout

2.Opensource the app
If time permitted, I will opensource the app.

That's all I want to let you know :)

 

Share web page to Twitter using Reader2Twitter

I talked about some user cases of Reader2Twitter yesterday. It seems that with Reader2Twitter, creating a new feed twitter account is so easy. Today, I want to tell you another feature I like with R2T: share web page both to GReader and Twitter.

Google Reader has a cool bookmarklet that let you share any web page to Google Reader with a click. And now, the magical time, we will see that if we use Reader2Twitter, it's so easy to share a web page to twitter using Google's bookmarklet.

Once you using the bookmarklet to share a web page to Google Reader, the share will be synced to Twitter if you use Reader2Twitter. If you have note on that share, it will also be synced to Twitter. It's cool. And if you setup bitly account in Reader2Twitter, the link of your sync tweet will be shortened using your bitly account. Now, you can view the analysis of your share!

So, it's today's Reader2Twitter tip. If you have your tips, please let me know:)

Some user case of Reader2Twitter

I built Reader2Twitter for easy sharing articles in Google Reader to Twitter. At that time, we had no Google Buzz. And someone maybe never use Google Buzz for the private affair. Twitter is such a cool tool for sharing and gaining response. With the PubSubHubbub protocol and the app engine hub from Google, I built R2T about 5 months ago. Here are some interesting user case of Reader2Twitter:

1.How Louis Gray use Reader2Twitter

Louis uses R2T and shares it on his blog. Thanks Louis. But he did not sync his GReader share to his main twitter account @louisgray, because his share account is high than average and he did not want to annoy his great amount of followers. Instead, he sync his Google Reader Shared items to his newly built twitter account @lgstream. It's cool. Now this account has more than 400 followers. I follow it for I like it to read lg's share on Twitter:)

2.How @terryxxy use Reader2Twitter

@terryxxy is popular in Chinese Twitter cycle. Like @louisgray, he built a new twitter account for syncing gr share. Moreover, he created a new wordpress blog to summarize his daily GR share items. It's interesting.

3.A user case of @lookon

it's me:) I recently create a new twitter account for sharing science news in China, @ScienceCN. At first, I'd like to write a programme to update the account. Suddenly, I know that I can use my tool to update it! I create a new Google Reader account and subscribe the science bundle from my main GR account. Then, I sync the new gr account's share to @ScienceCN. It's really cool.

If you have your way of using GR2T, please let me know! 

How to Setup Google Profile Number ID in Buzz2Twitter

A lot of Buzz2Twitter user may find it hard to setup Google Profile Number ID. Here is a tutorial:

1. Visit your Google Profile page.

2. If your Google Profile is like https://www.google.com/profiles/102355825161038461445, the number 102355825161038461445 is thus your Google Profile Number ID. Paste it to Buzz2Twitter, and click submit.

_2010-02-25_01

If your Google Profile is like https://www.google.com/profiles/areyoulookon, you have some more work:)

1. Click Edit profile on your profile.

2. You will find "Profile URL" at the bottom of the page. Click "See other options".

3.Then, you will find your profile url like https://www.google.com/profiles/102355825161038461445, and 102355825161038461445 is your Google Profile Number ID.

Wish you good luck! Have fun with buzz2twttter:) 

This is G2T's Official Blog

Google App Engine had a severe outage(about 1 hour) Since 7:53am PST. So G2T is unavailable during that time, which may cause you a lot of inconvenience. Sorry G2T's uers. To make better communication between G2T's user and G2T, I start this blog as G2T's Official Blog. If you have any word to say to us, please write down in the comment. Any comment is welcome:)

Our Twitter  : @gr2t