After reading about Rick Klau’s implementation of a collaborative podcast using del.icio.us I decided to do the same thing using Twitter. A quick read over the Twitter API and I had it set up and running. For those of you who don’t want to read Rick’s post, I’ll start from scratch and describe the idea and how I set it up.

The idea is simple, anytime someone mentions me (@SamWhited) on Twitter and includes a link to a media file (an MP3 for instance) the media file is automatically downloaded and synced to my Zune in the form of a podcast. Twitter makes it easy to re-tweet songs as well which is an added bonus.

Setting it all up is fairly easy, just set up a Feedburner account and burn a feed of the following URL:

https://<TwitterUsername>:<TwitterPassword>@twitter.com/statuses/mentions.rss

Then make sure podcasting is enabled for the feed and make sure to set any privacy options you may want. Now you can simply subscribe to the new Feedburner feed in any podcast client (Zune, iTunes, etc.).

So go tweet some tunage my way and thanks to Rick for the idea!

UPDATE: Apparently Twitter shortens all URL’s now and does not retain the files Content-Type header. This means Feedburner will not work. We need “Content-Type-burner”.

UPDATE 2: Turns out Feedburner is not following the 301 redirect properly; they are aware of the issue and hopefully we’ll see some progress soon.