Are you addicted to Twitter? I know I am. Wouldn't it be great if more and more of your friends would join in? Wouldn't you love recieving a SMS message to let you know that Jack is eating ice cream with his daugthers? But Jack doesn't understand Twitter? Or maybe he is telling you: I'm already wasting so much time on Facebook, there is simply no way I can keep two presence feeds going! Well, I have the solution for you. With this simple hack, you could automatically turn your Facebook friends into an army of twitterer!

First, you need a Twitter account, and a Facebook account. It works best if you have some Facebook friends as well: this is a social hack. What we are going to do next is turn your friend's status updates into a Twitter feed. Lets's start.

We need to create a Twitter robot account. So log-out of Twitter and create yourself a new account. Call it bobsrobot or something like that. Once the account is created, go to the settings page and make sure you make your bot's twitter account private, otherwise you will be publishing all of you're friends status online without their permission. Think about your friends' privacy. Don't put their life on the web without their concent.

We're almost there. Next, you need a TwitterFeed account. You might already have one. Oh, and you need an OpenID in order to get a TwitterFeed account. (Apparently, you can get an OpenID using you Facebook account, but I have not tried it.) I told you it was a hack. I just hope you're not using 1234 as the password for all those accounts. Ok, now you have a TwitterFeed account. Leave that window open, pop another one up, and log into Facebook. In the top-right corner, next to "Status Updates", click the "see all" link. A page will load with all your friends' status updates. That's what you want to get, isn't it? Right-click on the RSS icon labeled "Friends' Status Updates" in the right-side column and select "Copy Shortcut" (or "Copy Link Location" in Firefox.) Go back to your TwitterFeed window and click "Create new twitter feed". Fill-in your twitter robot account's username and password, then paste the Facebook RSS icon's shortcut into the "RSS Feed URL" box. Click "Create". You can always go back and play with your TwitterFeed settings to prefix the updates with a specific string, change the refresh interval, etc.

The last step is to subscribe your main Twitter account to recieve updates from your robot account. Go back to Twitter, log-out of the robot account and log back into your main account. Do "Find folks!" with the robot account's ID, then request a subscribtion. (If you don't see the little red lock next to it, then you haven't protected your friends' privacy. Go back and lock this down, please!) Log out again, log into your robot account, accept the request, log out again, then log into your main account. (I bet you know all those password by heart now!)

Now, you only need to wait for your friends to update their status on Facebook. You should recieve notifications on Twitter next time they do! I hoped you enjoyed this hack! It's working wonderfully for me.

So what do you do next? Well, you scream at people like me who have setup alternate TwitterFeeds in place that will post a Twitter message everytime I update my Facebook status, because you are now recieving those status updates twice.

Others did that before. You can look here or here, for example.

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