Just before BristolCon the plugin that I used to automatically tweet new blog posts from the various blogs that I manage stopped working. I’ve been on the road for much of the past two weeks and haven’t had a chance to find out what was going on. Finally I have taken a look, and I’m not happy. The plugin is called Twitter Tools, and I have recommended it to several people. A new version had been issued so I installed it. When I did so I discovered that it relied on a new plugin called Social that supposedly facilitates interaction with both Twitter and Facebook. In theory, that would be a good thing, but…

Firstly Social comes with a whole raft of new features that people might not want. In particular it claims to import comments on your blog posts that are left on Twitter and Facebook. In theory, that’s a very good thing, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of controls — it isn’t clear to me whether spam could be moderated. Also the plugin creates an account in WordPress for each person who comments on Twitter and Facebook, which I’m not comfortable about.

Worst of all, however, it simply doesn’t work. That is, I tried linking it to my Twitter account, logged in to Twitter successfully, and nothing happened. I tried it under both Firefox and Chrome. I’m not impressed.

This is a pain, because I’m now going to have to tweet manually whenever I post to a blog. I’ll probably end up using HootSuite, though I do wish that it would link to self-hosted WordPress blogs as well as those on WordPress.com. I’m also going to check out WordTwit, which is a new plugin that seems to be what I need.

Anyone else also struggling with this issue?