| Listen to Twitter
hear tweets playing over streaming radio |
How to convert tweets into audio to play over streaming radio:
The experience of listening to Tweets is very different from reading them:
- Your ear cannot scan through twitter-overload as quickly as your eye can.
- Your attention level is different when listening to radio than it is when reading.
- The kind of content you hear on the radio may be different than what you want when at your computer.
For these reasons, setting up your Twitter stream for radio does not exactly match your desktop Twitter application. With RadioWeave, for the best audio experience, you will selectively choose which Twitter streams you want to follow independently from what you may have chosen at the Twitter web site.
Note: to avoid overloading Twitter, we only ask for updates every few minutes and keep the latest 20 tweets per channel. Thus, all tweets from busy channels are not guaranteed to be ingested.
Follow these instructions to add Tweets to your audio stream:
- Check if Twitter channel already exists
- If Twitter channel already exists, add it to your stream. Done.
- If Twitter channel does not exist, create a new channel.
- Select channel type "twitter"
- Select "twitter type"
- Enter twitter user name (or hashtag, list, or application)
- Choose a voice (and, optionally, description)
- Done
1. Check if Twitter channel already exists:
Using the search field I've entered "spinlock", which is the twitter name of a friend of mine.
Search shows that a channel already exists for "twitter:spinlock" so I can just click on the channel to add it to my weave (see step 2). If search found no such channel, I would then make the channel (as shown in step 3).
2. If Twitter channel already exists, add it to your stream. Done.
In the previous step, a search for "spinlock" found an existing channel. Clicking on that channel opens the channel explorer view, from which I can click on "add to weave".
spinlock's tweets are now part of of my radio, as represented in the weave as the channel: "twitter:spinlock".
Done.
3. If Twitter channel does not exist, create a new channel.
If step 1 had not found the twitter channel already in RadioWeave, then I can create it here. For instance, my friend EugeniaLoli is not already in the system, so I'll add her Twitter channel now.
First, from the "contribute"tab I will click on the "new channel" option.
4. Select channel type "twitter"
5. Select "twitter type"
Now select the type of twitter channel you want to create. Usually this will be a particular person, but other options are availble.
Note that RadioWeave limits the rate at which tweets are ingested for any particular channel. This limit exists because tweets are converted to speech, and so take a few seconds to hear. It would be ridiculous to try to important everything from a busy list or twitter type—they would be ingested faster than you could hear them!
For this example I selected "follow one user".
6. Enter twitter user name (or hashtag, list, or application)
I enter my friend's twitter name "EugeniaLoli"
7. Choose a voice (and, optionally, description)
Select the voice you want to read the tweets for this channel. Pressing the
buttons will let you preview each voice. For this twitter channel
I chose the "Amy" voice (which doesn't sound at all like Eugenia).
8. Done
If all of the fields are to your liking, click on "create this channel". The twitter channel will be created and added to your weave. In a few minutes the first few tweets will enter this channel.
Congratulations. You have made an audio twitter channel for radio.
