Finding and using your Twitter RSS feeds

At one time Twitter users had full access to their RSS feeds. Since the re-design of the Twitter universe some of these features were removed. However, they were not disabled and so access to these items is still available.

In this post I will show you how you go about finding out the RSS feed for your Twitter timeline and your public facing Twitter lists.

TWITTER TIMELINE

Before the Twitter re-design all one had to do to find an RSS feed was to browse to a user’s profile page. Since this feature has been disabled we now need to do a bit of simple hacking to the URL of the user’s profile. To do this follow the simple steps below:

1. Go to Twitter.com and search for a user. Select the user for the feeds you wish to receive. You will get a URL similar to this – https://twitter.com/#!/KenCenerelli

2. To subscribe to this user’s feed we will need to modify the standard Twitter user’s RSS feed URL which looks like the following – http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[UniqueID].rss Every Twitter user has a unique id. To find one you can use a service like http://www.idfromuser.com Searching within the site for my name I know my id is 386101798.

So when I replace [UniqueID] in the standard URL my RSS feed becomes http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/386101798.rss

I can also elect to use the Twitter user name in the URL as well. An example with my name would be http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/KenCenerelli.rss

3. You can then subscribe to this list in your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader or Microsoft Outlook. It can also be placed on a blog as an RSS feed if you do not have a Twitter feed widget installed.

TWITTER LISTS

RSS feeds are also available for your public facing Twitter lists. Note that this functionality is not available for any private lists.

1. As above we need to modify the standard URL for Twitter lists – http://api.twitter.com/1/[Author]/lists/[Twitter List Name]/statuses.atom

To create an RSS feed of a Twitter list all we need to do is change the [Author] to the name of the list creator and the [Twitter List Name] to the name of the Twitter list they are publicizing.

As an example, if you wish to see my public list on my hometown of Guelph, Ontario, Canada you would browse to
http://api.twitter.com/1/KenCenerelli/lists/guelph-ontario-canada/statuses.atom

2. You can then subscribe to this list in your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader or Microsoft Outlook.