One reason why I dislike Twitter is currently is because they stopped explicitly supporting RSS feeds. They want you to make Yet Another Account and follow Yet Another Website. It's one of my greatest complaints with Facebook (delaying message notification e-mails by 15 minutes? but then adding context to Like notification e-mails? but then re-implementing e-mail (poorly)? but then opening up chat using XMPP?)
Thankfully, you can still find RSS feeds for Twitter feeds but you have to do figure out the URL to them yourself.
Method 1:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=USERNAMETry adding that to your RSS reader [1]. Sadly, if I visit it in my browser, it's not recognised as an RSS feed, but it is when I put it into Google Reader.
Method 2:
If method 1 doesn't work for your reader, try this, which is the URL that method 1 gives your reader anyway [2].Subscribe to:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USERID.rss
where USERID is a numeric ID for a user. I've been using http://id.twidder.info/ to determine USERIDs from usernames. (There's also http://www.idfromuser.com but that failed to find several.)
It's bad enough that Twitter's RSS feeds are updated such that tweets get clumped together at a minute mark rather than having their true post time associated with them. Sigh.
References
- http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/06/23/how-to-find-the-rss-feed-for-any-twitter-user/
- http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-hasnt-killed-rss-just-yet-heres-how-to-find-your-twitter-feed-rss-url/
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