One of the things that always bothered me, though, was the fact that I missed so much of the conversation because I was doing unimportant things like sleeping, working, or having (God forbid) analogue conversations in the real world.  Not that I really need to know every time Jason Calacanis walks his dogs, but since so many of the people I follow use Twitter as a way to spread news and share links, it felt like I was missing some quality conversation.

So, I asked for help.  How can I subscribe to an RSS feed of just those posts where my friends are sharing links?  Within two minutes, @kaziel, a web developer from Mexico City, answered my question and sent me a link to a custom Yahoo! Pipes page that did just that.  I was able to tweak it to work with my own feed, and now I can get those Twittered URLs directly into my RSS feed, and effectively outsource my blog reading to people much smarter and more diverse than I.

To me, this is a testament to the open philosophy of social media and those I follow, and As Mike Sansone of ConverStations points out, this is a great first step in getting more signal out of Twitter.  It’s a pretty easy little trick, and you can clone the pipe right from mine, but if you need a little coaching, Mike’s got a pretty good explanation of how to make it work.