Twitter recently made some changes to their API. One of them has an impact if you’re trying to access someone’s Twitter RSS Feed.
This used to work extremely well: on every user’s Twitter page there was an RSS Icon in your browser bar. We sued click on it and saw the feed. Well not anymore 🙁
But help is at hand – thanks to The Sociable who have kindly explained how to access it post May 2011.
Here’s what you do to find it:
ID From User
RSS Feeds no longer contain the Twitter username. Instead they now use the User ID to generate the feed (that way a user name change doesn’t impact on the feed URI).
Check out http://www.idfromuser.com/ to convert the Twitter user name into a numeric ID. For example, my Twitter handle is versluis. Thanks to that website I now know that my user ID is 16255732. Sweet!
Sample Twitter RSS Feed
The next thing you just have to “know” somehow – which is why I’m spreading the word about it. Here’s what a sample Twitter User’s RSS Feed looks like:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/XXX.rss
Exactly. Replace the XXX with the user’s ID and you’ll get a working feed, like this one:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16255732.rss
Happiness!
You can also get a feed delivered to your email through various services, such as feedmyinbox.com or Google’s feedburner. The 1st one is easier.