Posted by Doug Lacombe

I am a man of modest desires. Little things like getting news items to show on both Twitter and a Facebook fan page thrill me. And really, is it too much to ask in this uber-connected social media universe that I could publish once and cascade that content many times?

Apparently, some days, it is.

Now before you or I get going, if the RSS feed in question originates from a Wordpress blog, there are many plugins that can handle auto-tweeting posts. And the Notes function of a Facebook fan page hoovers in a RSS feed in a reasonable amount of time (usually under one hour versus the published standard of under three). Or just suck the Twitter feed into the fan page and voila!

But what if you’re not on Wordpress (perish the thought!) and you have multiple RSS feeds to auto-tweet and post?

Well, you’re mostly screwed.

Whoa Nelly, before you get your panties in a syndication, let me tell you about the heroic efforts that have been already made.

Before you get all smug, thinking “he needs Twitterfeed”, consider this: I enjoy Twitterfeed about as much as I do a case of athletes foot. This pile of bubble gum and binder twine may or may not find your RSS updates, taking up to 10 hours if it even does. Oh, and how to get that Twitterfeed into a fan page? No problem, pipe it through ping.fm, the service that works with fan pages then doesn’t, then does. Oh joy.

Hey! What about Yahoo pipes? They’re full of super-nerdy-rss-combining goodness aren’t they? Same end result – because the piped feed had to go through Twitterfeed, oh and the newly reconstituted three feeds into one showed in Facebook HOURS later. Zzzzzzz. I could type it in faster.

What about Hellotxt? Seems like just another Twitterfeed – and I tire of the foolishness.

Maybe Feedburner’s “socialize” feature? Handles Twitter, but doesn’t solve the three feeds to fan page problem.

So here I go to explore dlvr.it (invitation thanks to an anonymous web mega-smarty-pants who likes to remain nameless) and Google’s new(ish) publish/subscribe protocol pubsubhubbub.

Suck on that, Twitterfeed.