RSS for Twitter feed?

January 25, 2011 6:26 PM

RSS for Twitter feed - how to find?

It used to be easy to find the RSS feed for a Twitter account...but with the "new and improved" profiles, I just can't figure out where the RSS feed/link is hiding. Help?

posted by davidmsc to technology (6 answers total)

It looks like it's the very last thing on the right-hand column of the page. I don't have an account, though, so it might be different if you're logged in.
posted by wayland at 6:32 PM on January 25, 2011

That's the "old" Twitter layout, wayland--it's different in the new layout, which inexplicably only provides RSS links to your own Favorites Stream, even when you're viewing someone else's stream.

It's been driving me absolutely nuts, too!

I've been building up the feed URL by hand lately like this:

1. View source of the "new" profiles and do a Find for "id":

2. Copy and paste the id number in place of the zeroes in this template: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/00000000.rss

I'm sure there's a more elegant way to quickly do this with a userscript or even just a javascript snippet, but strangely I have been unable to find anyone who has written one.
posted by bcwinters at 6:50 PM on January 25, 2011

Not sure if this is the same issue you're describing, but I've had problems with Twitter's RSS feeds since the switchover to New Twitter late last year. Clicking the RSS icon in my browser window (Chrome, using the RSS extension) used to let me add each Twitter user's feed to Google Reader, but now instead generates a single feed for all my favourites, no matter whose Twitter page I'm on. Twitter gave me the option a few days ago to view someone's page as Old Twitter, and, lo and behold, the RSS icon on that page worked just fine.

Some people think Twitter deliberately broke their own RSS feeds during the switchover; I have no idea if this is true, but I'll be watching this thread, hoping someone's able to offer a solution.
posted by hot soup girl at 6:50 PM on January 25, 2011

I had this issue too. The linked RSS feed now lists the tweets that the user has favourited rather than their tweets. To get their tweets you can use the following feed:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={USERNAME}

Where {USERNAME} is their username, so for example my feed is at:

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

I've no idea how reliable this is (I use it to populate my 4 most recent tweets on my homepage). As far as I know this only differs from bcwinters suggestion in that you can give a username.
posted by rmas at 7:01 PM on January 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Thanks all - fixed the problem! Once again, AskMeFi to the rescue!
posted by davidmsc at 3:03 PM on January 27, 2011

This method is broken for me.
posted by Hammerikaner at 4:45 PM on October 21, 2011