Twitter RSS & Atom Feeds

Since it seems like they did away with feeds on Twitter, I wanted to add a short post/page on how to get yours and others from the more hidden place they put it.

The Twitter RSS feeds are still available, they’re just not published directly in a link element or anywhere on the web page proper.

To access a user’s stream via RSS, you must first determine their user ID from their screen name, for example:

https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=splorp

One you have the user ID, you can use this URI to obtain the RSS feed:

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

Substituting .rss for .atom will return the applicable feed type.

You can also pass terms into the Twitter search engine:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=MessagePad