Finding Health Care Professionals on Twitter
Image by luc legay via Flickr
A little over a year ago, before Twitter was the tech/pop culture phenomenon it is today, doctors like myself had a problem: how do you identify other health professionals on Twitter? (At the time, there must have been at least dozens. Dozens.)
This was the first solution. In retrospect, it was hilariously cobbled-together:
This is a feed containing the conversations of all known doctors and medical students who use Twitter: http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorsontwitter. (If that doesn’t work, you can try the original feed from Yahoo Pipes instead.) Technical details, for those interested: I used this list of doctors/medical students on Kidney Notes, ran each person’s Twitter feed through Yahoo Pipes, then burned a FeedBurner feed.
When FriendFeed debuted, I created “The Doctor’s Room,” which was populated by both Twitter feeds and RSS feeds of physicians. Unfortunately, the “room” feature was poorly designed by FriendFeed (which has since been acquired by Facebook). Like the Yahoo Pipes experiment, the FriendFeed room was an educational failure. Read more »
This post, Finding Health Care Professionals on Twitter, was originally published on Healthine.com by Joshua Schwimmer, M.D..
