I’ve made it no secret that I’m a big fan of Twitter.  Being instantly connected to a large number of people I consider intelligent and interesting whether I’m at my computer or on my Blackberry is an incredible thing.  I’ve asked and answered questions, looked for help and helped others and have connected people and arranged gatherings.  It’s the one tool I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

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.