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Twitter RSS feeds URLs & ID location

Twitter did it again 🙁

Implementing a platform-restricting policy, they first killed Friendfeed’s (maybe other aggregators’ as well) ability to post to Twitter. They also recently killed FriendFeed’s (maybe other aggregators’ as well) ability to receive input from Twitter accounts. And, somewhere down the line, they hid the link to an account’s and its lists’ RSS feeds. Luckily, there’s a workaround for the feeds part.

Timeline RSS feed

The RSS feed URL is now in the form http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/<Twitter username>.rss (as mentioned in “Twitter hasn’t killed RSS just yet, here’s how to find your Twitter feed RSS url“) or http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=<Twitter username> (as mentioned in “RSS for Twitter feed?“). So, my own feed would be http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ageor.rss or http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=ageor. If this looks difficult, TwitterFeeder.com will create the first URL form for you.

List RSS feed

The RSS feed for a public list is in the form http://api.twitter.com/1//lists/<Twitter username>/statuses.atom (as mentioned in “As Twitter protects its ecosystem, here’s how to create an RSS feed of a Twitter List“). So, my “over2000” list feed would be in http://api.twitter.com/1/ageor/lists/over2000/statuses.atom

Locate Twitter ID

You can also substitute <Twitter username> with a Twitter user’s ID (as some posts suggest). For the sake of completeness, here is how to locate any user’s Twitter ID, as suggested in Archive for the ‘get twitter user id’ tag:

  1. Go to http://api.twitter.com/users/show/<Twitter username>.json (substitute the intended username)
  2. Download the produced file
  3. Open the file and find user’s ID near the end, after ‘”id”:’ (search without the single quotes)

A note of caution: When displaying a feed in a browser (a good practice to check if the URL is correct), the protocol may automatically change to https. As I needed it for FriendFeed, I had to make sure I am using the http version. This may apply to other news readers as well.

I don’t like Twitter or anyone changing the rules, especially if it is for the worse. Workarounds are then very comforting 🙂

5 comments to Twitter RSS feeds URLs & ID location

  • agoda coupon codes

    I usually do not leave a great deal of comments, however i did a few searching and
    wound up here Twitter RSS feeds URLs & ID location |
    DiPot: Ice Tea tech. And I actually do have 2 questions
    for you if you usually do not mind. Is it simply me or does it look like some of the
    remarks appear as if they are left by brain dead people?
    😛 And, if you are posting on additional online sites, I would
    like to keep up with everything new you have to post.
    Could you list of every one of your social sites like your Facebook page,
    twitter feed, or linkedin profile?

  • Henry Opalicki

    Thanks a lot for sharing this with all of us you actually know what you’re talking about! Bookmarked. Please also visit my web site =). We could have a link exchange contract between us!

  • asp.net development

    Thanks! you give the very intelligent points for RSS. you give the knowledge of it so i hope people will surely like it.

  • Hi ageor, thanks for the mention, we also are working on an RSS generator application – the beta is live here http://j.mp/mTpQlK

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