How to follow your friends' Twitters without signing up to Twitter

A useful mini-tutorial for people on Jaiku who want to follow their friends' Tweets but don't want to sign up for Twitter. Note this only works if your friends haven't required people to sign in to view their Tweets.

1. Go to http://jaiku.com/channel/create and sign in.
2. Once you've given your channel a name, add a short description and click Save Changes once you're done.
3. Click the Edit link next to Feeds.
4. Click on Add another Atom or RSS feed.
5. Enter the URL of the Twitter you want to subscribe to, in the form twitter.com/name.
6. Click Find Feeds.
7. Click the button next to whichever feed you want (RSS or Atom, that person's Twitter or the person's Twitters along with those of his or her friends).
8. Click Add Feed.
9. Do the same for other Twitters you want to add.
10. You can add an icon for the channel, create a badge (widget) for your website, modify colors and so on from the URL http://jaiku.com/channel/[channel name]/settings/design at any time.

You're automatically a member of a channel you create, and it will show up under your Contacts. That way, you can follow your friends on Jaiku without fellow Jaikus being annoyed that they're reading stuff from people they don't know (as would be the case if you just added feeds directly.

I see Michael Sauers has created a channel for Internet Librarian 2007, but he hasn't added any content to it.

Comments

[Bryan Alexander]

Very helpful. Thank you for doing this.

[Jill Hurst-Wahl]

Steve, I'm posting this after the fact (sorry). For the IL2007 Twitter group, you needed to look at (follow) this URL:

http://twitter.com/IL2007/with_friends

Once Michael set it up, it immediately started picking up whatever messages members of the group were sending. The group is still active, but I suspect he'll disband it at some point (and likely create one for Computers in Libraries, I hope).

BTW since to meet you at the conference! Always good to put a face with a blogger's name!