Automatically posting GooglePlus articles to Twitter

By Leo Gaggl

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook.

RSS Logo

However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream. Unfortunately Google has (stupidly / purposely / nastily) not included RSS support to make this possible without much work. There are a few publicly accessibly services out there, but they generally are either not updated or tend to fail very frequently as they hit the API Access limits as soon as they get a few users on their services.

To achieve this I have created a PHP script utilising the Google API Client to convert the public activities to a standard RSS feed. The code is available on GitHub. I used to use a script by by Michael Mahemoff (https://plus.google.com/106413090159067280619/posts/8NE3cFi4cB6) – thank you ! The main reasons for needing to change were IFTTT having issues with the initial script output (not valid RSS and illegal characters).

Create API Project

  1. Go to https://cloud.google.com/console/
  2. Create a project
  3. Go to ‘APIs & auth’ –> ‘APIs’ and turn “Google+ API” on (see Screenshot below)
  4. Go to ‘APIs & auth’ –> ‘APIs’ and create a ‘Public API access’ key (see Screenshot below)
  5. Copy the API Key for the next step

Setting up the RSS Feed

  1. Copy files from Github repository to your website (either by downloading the ZIP file or cloning the repository
  2. Change your Google User ID and your API Key (from the previous step) in gplus2rss.php
  3. Test the feed on your YOURWEBSITE/gplus2rss.php (and copy the URL for the next step)

You can then use the standard IFTTT RSS Feed trigger to post to a Twitter Channel to automatically update Twitter anytime you post to Google+.

Setting up IFTT

  1. Create a new IFTTT recipe here: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/new
  2. Choose the ‘Feed’ trigger
  3. Choose the ‘New Item’ to trigger the recipe whenever a new item appears in your GPlus feed
  4. Paste your feed link and click on ‘Create Trigger’
  5. Click on the ‘that’ link to create the action
  6. Paste your feed link and click on ‘Create Trigger’
  7. Choose ‘Twitter’ icon and choose ‘Create new Tweet’ as the action
  8. Paste your feed link and click on ‘Create Trigger’
  9. Choose the fields from the feed (see screenshot below)
  10. Finish off by clicking the ‘Create Recipe’ button