Sharing what I see

April 4, 2009 6:14 PM

Is there a way to share your own view of a Twitter account? I realize I might need to clarify what I'm asking for.

I've got a Twitter account I'm using to follow a bunch of accounts all of which post on a similar subject. I don't actually send many tweets to that account myself, but I'd like to be able to share the feed as it appears to me (with other users' tweets) with friends. Is that possible, preferably without having to dig into the nuts and bolts of the API?

posted by JaredSeth to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Twitter.com does not provide this functionality. It would be simple for a third party app to create these feeds, at least for any public accounts you followed.
posted by davebug at 6:28 PM on April 4

You can take each individual Twitter feed and run them through Yahoo Pipes to create one feed with all of them. Kind of a pain, but gets the results you want.
posted by nitsuj at 6:39 PM on April 4

This post on Read, Write Web points out some useful tools that should do what you are asking.
posted by ajr at 7:29 PM on April 4

You can take each individual Twitter feed and run them through Yahoo Pipes to create one feed with all of them. Kind of a pain, but gets the results you want.

It's actually much, much simpler than that.

You can grab your public timeline by going to the following url:

http://USERNAME:[e-mail]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

where USERNAME is your twitter username and PASSWORD is your twitter password. Here's a sample account with those details provided (I know we're all jokers here, but it would be helpful to the OP if you don't muck about with the password -- thanks!)

http://samplepipesuser:[e-mail]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

Now, that link is only going to work in browsers that are smart about setting headers (like Firefox -- it appears to fail in IE6), and may not be usable by some RSS readers. You also might want to conceal your login info (which hey, is probably a good idea). Fortunately, you can use Yahoo pipes to proxy a random feed URL to your authenticated feed. How? Well, I've made a super simple pipe that you can find here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=qsklAswh3hGsqx8q1ZzWFw

Here's what you do:

1. Create a yahoo account if necessary, and clone the pipe to your own account.
2. Replace the URL with the authenticated URL you've created ie: http://YOUR_TWITTER_USERNAME:[e-mail]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

3. Change this description as you see fit (it shows up as the rss feed description).

4. save & run pipe. Click 'get rss' and make a note of the URL.

5. share the url with friends!

6. Don't publish your pipe unless you want other people to know your twitter password and make funny tweets on your behalf.

Please respect other users' privacy settings -- it would be incredibly rude to publish a feed that includes users whose tweets are set to private. You should probably unfollow any users who have privacy turned on, or set up a new account with only public twitter feeds followed.
posted by ragaskar at 3:45 AM on April 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks for the great suggestions. I'm going to give some of these a shot later today and see how they work out.

ragaskar, those are some great instructions, and assuming I can find some way to obfuscate the password, I may give that a shot. My fear isn't people making funny tweets as me, more that they'd use my account to post smart ass replies to those I'm following.

Also, consider your warning points taken. I am only planning to use this on public feeds...basically as a kind of "tweet aggregator".
posted by JaredSeth at 5:06 AM on April 5

well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. I could've sworn non-published pipes could not be viewed by others, but they can be. hmmmm.

...

Ok, I've rebuilt the pipe using a 'private Text source' for the password and a regular "text Source" for the username. Now all you have to do is:

1. clone pipe
2. set defaults for username and password fields. Make sure the Private box is checked for password! If someone else tries to Viewsource/Clone your pipe, the password field will be cleared for them. You'll be able to see it in cleartext, however.
3. Save the pipe.
4. Go to the run pipe page and run it. This will give you a feed URL that you can give to your friends.
posted by ragaskar at 10:16 AM on April 5

WARNING: clicking the above username / password twitter.com link WILL SIGN YOU IN as samplepipesuser. This may not be entirely apparent when you go to Twitter.com next, and you might accidentally tweet as that account rather than your own.

I just barely caught it myself. Obviously this means sharing any such twitter.com link will sign in whoever clicks on it to your account.
posted by davebug at 10:33 AM on April 5

So if I give this feed link to someone, it's going to log them as my account? Hmm.

If so, what about if I display the feed in a WordPress sidebar widget or on a page of it's own? No one would be able to log in that way, right? And wouldn't be able to get the password by viewing source?

And thanks all, I really appreciate this. Essentially I'm just looking to share tweets I find useful with friends who don't have - or want - Twitter accounts. If I could avoid giving them the ability to mess with the feed, so much the better.
posted by JaredSeth at 12:22 PM on April 5

Just tested...if I embed the Pipe in an RSS WordPress widget, I can indeed see the password by viewing source. It doesn't automatically log me in to Twitter using that account, but I guess it would just be a matter of time til someone hijacked the account.

It did achieve exactly the look I was hoping for though!
posted by JaredSeth at 12:54 PM on April 5

Okay, since I didn't really want anyone to have to enter the Twitter account name or password anyway, I changed the first text box in ragaskar's example to a simple String Builder text box and the password one to a Private String and that appears to have obfuscated the password.

Thanks everybody. I'm going to give the best answer to ragaskar, but for posterity's sake I should mention that there are some interesting tools at the link ajr provides (not just the same Twitter apps I see listed everywhere).
posted by JaredSeth at 2:27 PM on April 5