RSS feeds: your own or someone else’s tweets

[EDIT/UPDATE: Twitter dropped support for RSS so the methods below no longer work – use this method instead: http://www.labnol.org/internet/twitter-rss-feed/28149/]

There are a number of reasons for trying to obtain RSS feeds of a user’s tweets. Unfortunately, Twitter removed all direct RSS functionality from its website in 2011 – you used to be able to click on a handy RSS button that would give you a feed of pretty much whatever you wanted

Whatever the reason you want to do it, the simplest way I’ve found – to get a very basic RSS – is to use the following query in your browser:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss

So, as an example, if I wanted to generate an RSS feed of my own tweets I would enter the following in my browser (inserting my username):

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ilegal.rss

You can also use someone else’s @name if you wanted, providing their account isn’t private of course. Obviously, this would give you a feed of their tweets

Another, little bit more complicated way, is to use the user ID number of the Tweep whose timeline you want to follow in place of ‘username’ above. You can find out your (or anyone else’s) Twitter ID number using this site (there are others): http://www.idfromuser.com/

Again, as an example, using my own Twitter ID number (40003471) would give you the following search query:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/40003471.rss

You could also give this one a spin (insert your name where I’ve put mine):

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=ilegal

All three methods work fine for me in my browser Safari (5.1.7). However, whatever you decided you wanted to do with the feed would probably dictate which one you went with. For example, the last one here produces a very workable feed that works well in Yahoo Pipes

If you have a method you prefer or, want to add your thoughts on the useability of the those above, I’d love to hear from you in the replies

To finish up, this is probably the simplest way of pulling an RSS feed from a search query together on Twitter. Using Safari, once bookmarked, the feed continues to update whenever you are online and your browser is open. However, if you wanted to use a feed reader then you might have to burn the feed and tidy it up somewhat. Google’s Feedburner is the place to go. As well as sorting out your ‘virgin’ feed, it gives you lots of abilities such as being able to track interactions with it and suchlike

Next time I’ll go through getting feeds from Twitter lists and (my favourite) various types of search query

I’m also doing some stuff (well, I will be when I get round to it) on incorporating geo-location into a Twitter search – being able to, say, put together an RSS feed of tweets relating to a particular topic/hashtag/username happening within a certain radius of a physical point eg a town or city. Will blog this up as soon as I can

Thanks for reading