If you go to http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/ and click on "Want Twitter to update your Facebook status? Click here!", Twitter will thereafter permanently update your Facebook status (i.e. the "[First name] is ..." text) whenever you post a message on Twitter (with the exception of replies or references to other Twitter peeps using the at symbol followed by the Twitter username, e.g. @theJoshMeister). So if I post "There's a new episode of Tech Pulse up at http://techpulsepodcast.com !!!" on Twitter, my Facebook status would then change to say "Josh is twittering: There's a new episode of Tech Pulse up at http://techpulsepodcast.com !!!"
Now here's the annoying side effect: Your Facebook News Feed and Mini-Feed will now double-post every time you update Twitter. (First you'll get an item in your feeds with the Twitter "t" logo and the contents of your new tweet, and then immediately after that you'll get a Facebook status update with the exact same contents, but preceded by "[First name] is twittering: ".) Here's a visual example from the profile of another Facebook and Twitter user, iJustine:
After a lot of frustration, I finally found a setting that will allow you to go back to having just one instance of your Twitter message in your feeds. Basically, you just have to remove the Twitter application's permission to post messages in your feeds. Here's how:
1) Log into Facebook (if necessary)
2) Go to http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?
3) Next to "Twitter", click on "Edit Settings"
4) Uncheck "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed", and then click "Save"
To clarify: this disables the feed items that have the Twitter "t" logo, but it leaves the "[first name] is twittering: " status update feed items enabled.
I hope this helps someone out there who has been as annoyed by the dual Facebook feed posts as I was. If you found this tip useful (or any other on this site), please consider making a donation:
3 comments:
Thanks this does help alot! Luckily I did not add the app before reading your post. Keep up the good work.
Jeremy
Hey. I know this was ages ago but I was wondering - my twitter entries in the news feed - not hte status change, just the news feed entry - have stopped with teh official twitter app. has this happened to you? any idea why?
Thanks,
Rav
Rav: I hadn't noticed any change. However, I went back to my Twitter app settings by following the instructions in my post, and I noticed that somehow News Feed and Mini-Feed are checked again without my authorization (which is rather weird). In spite of this strange occurrence, I don't get double-posts in my feeds anymore. I checked iJustine's Facebook profile and saw that she's no longer getting double posts, but of course she may have fixed that on her own at some point. Perhaps enough people complained that the Twitter folks silently updated their app to prevent double-posting. It's kind of disturbing that either Twitter or Facebook somehow changed my application privacy settings without my authorization, though.
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