In this post I will detail how to remove yourself from your social life. Well, just the link sharing part on Twitter.

At an event held last September, Twitter released some usage stats, including this: around 25% of Tweets contain links.

One must wonder if Twitter spammers have skewed this data. How would my own account compare against this? Using SnapBird to search my tweets for http, I have calculated that about 34% of my activity on Twitter is link sharing...

I don't think my tweets are that spammy, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of the enjoyment I get from Twitter is from useful and interesting link exchange, and having questions answered by people who write popular programming books and blogs.

On to the focus of this blog post, which will either reduce the friction of doing what may be a significant chunk of your Twitter workflow, or may just serve to drive these stats up...

Once upon a time in an attempt at clever laziness, I set my Delicious bookmarks to post a weekly blog aggregating the new links I added. People don't go to a blog to see a list of links plastered there by a cron job.

But what if you could take this idea and deliver the links in limited chunks (i.e. one link at a time, with a maximum of three per thirty minutes) on a platform where linking is accepted? If it is any indicator, none of my followers complained. Just make sure you keep the human touch by manually Tweeting thoughts, engaging people with questions, and the occasional Retweet.

The idea is simple: gather your Instapaper and Google Reader starred items into a RSS feed, and set it to post new items to your Twitter (or Facebook).

Instapaper

Log in to Instapaper and go to your Starred folder,

Right click the RSS link and copy the address into a text file (for later use).

Reader

Now go to your Google Reader account and open the Google Reader settings,

Open the Folders and Tags tab, and select Your Starred Items,

Change the sharing settings to Public,

Click View Public Page and right click the Atom feed link and copy the address into your text file.

Pipes

With Yahoo Pipes we create a master feed. Sign up there and create a new pipe. Add a Fetch Feed module to it,

Fill in the feed addresses that you copied down before, and connect the Fetch Feed module to the Pipe Output,

Save it and right click Get as RSS, copy the address down too :) (Note: Not the Pipe Web Address)

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is used to take your master feed and update Twitter, or Facebook, or Ping.fm which can subsequently update many more services. Sign up and create a new feed with the master feed URL you copied from Pipes,

Follow the next steps to connect it to your desired service (and Tweak how many posts per 30 minutes or whatever...).

There you go. Time to test it out:

You may also want to add your Last.fm loved tracks, Flickr photostream or WeHeartIt account. Unfortunately Pinboard (a great alternative to Delicious), while providing RSS feeds for certain tags, and supporting "starring", does not allow you to get an RSS feed of the starred items. I get around this by using a tag called highlight. I have requested this feature, I hope it gets added :)

Pipes actually allows a lot more than simple combination. Have a play and let us know in the comments what you come up with.