I am not a big fan of Twitter but lot of geeks I respect seem to use it. I used to follow a few Twitter accounts using RSS in Google Reader. Basically, I will go to the Twitter account’s page and there will be a RSS icon. Clicking it will subscribe the feed in your favorite RSS reader. I can follow the accounts from Google Reader as if it is yet another blog.
Unfortunately, Twitter recently announced that they are not planning to support RSS directly. If you go to the latest Twitter page of the account you want to follow, you will not see a RSS icon. This annoyed me to no end as it used to provide a convenient way for me to follow the accounts in the comfort of Google Reader. The following are are some of the hacks that you can use to get the RSS feed url to subscribe in your reader. I have arranged them from easy to hard.
Method 1 : Using Google Reader’s Add Subscription
This seems to work for me as of now and hopefully will work in the near future. If you are using Google Reader, click on "Add Subscription" button. In the textbox, enter the url as "http://twitter.com/username" . Change the username to the actual account name that you want to follow. This will subscribe you to the account’s feed.
Method 2: Using Account Name in Twitter API
If the above did not work or if you are using other RSS reader , there is an alternative. If you know only the account name, use the following as the feed url :
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=accountName
This technique uses information from Twitter’s dev wiki of the API that returns the last 20 statuses of the user.
Method 3: Using User ID in Twitter API
This method is slightly more advanced and assumes that you know the user id of the account that you want to follow. This number is not easy to find – especially in the new twitter. The following instructions assume you use Chrome, but the instructions for Firefox must be similar. For other browser users, you can use the overall idea given here and adapt it to your browser.
(1) Go to the account that you want to follow. Click on the "Tweets" tab so that the last few tweets are visible.
(2) Now select few of the initial tweets using the mouse.
(3) Right click -> Inspect Element
(4) In the develop tools that is now shown, enter the account name of the user. Find the instance that comes with the user-id field. A sample might be :
<a class="tweet-screen-name user-profile-link" data-user-id="1234567890" href="/#!/accountname" title="Account Name">Account Name</a>
Alternatively, you can search for "data-user-id" (without quotes) in the search box. Note that entering part of it (say user-id) will not work. It has to be exact. Find the element that corresponds to the user profile.
(5) In the list of elements that are matched, find the number whose length is between 8-10 – eg 1234567890.
(6) This is the user id of the account.
Once you get the user id, there are two methods to subscribe. One uses the variation of previous method. Enter the feed url as (replace 1234567890 with the actual one)
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?user_id=1234567890
The other alternative is to use the following as the feed url (replace 1234567890 with the actual one)
I hope one of the methods works for you and helps you to follow your favorite Twitter accounts using your greatest RSS reader 🙂
You’re a lifesaver. I just found this today after noticing a day or two ago that Twitter had done away with their RSS support & being frustrated completely about it.
Thank you!!!
(By the way, method #1 worked for me.)
Thanks for this post this really helped. 🙂
[…] Google Reader […]
nice….thank you !!
Will these work if the individual I want to “follow” through my reader has protected their tweets? Or is this only possible to read status updates of those whose tweets are public? Thanks!
Debbie,
I think it will only work if the status updates are public. I will check out if there is some other way to read protected tweets (assuming that you are in the white list of users allowed to see it of course). I will try to do some checking this weekend.
Debbie,
I took some time to check out protected tweets and I was not able to fetch them using RSS.
The last method worked for me, except that it was http:, not https:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1234567890.rss
@Jah,
I will update the doc with this info !
I got it to work in Apple Mail with Method 2. Thanks for posting this!
Thanks very much for this article. It helped me a lot.
Andre
[…] Tomemos como ejemplo un XML de los últimos tweets de un usuario de Twitter, @skotperez en este caso. Podemos extraer esta información gracias a la API de Twitter. […]
Method 3 did the trick.
Very helpful, thank you for posting this.
Method 1 used to work for me until a couple of weeks ago.
I just tried Method 2 and it worked! Oh, I’m so happy!! THANKS!!!
Thank you for the how-to. Method 2 works great for me in Thunderbird.
Method 2 worked for me, thanks!!
Thnx a lot, method 2 worked great for me (with Outlook 2010 rss feeds)
[…] I found this post describing as much as three different methods of acquiring a working url to a user’s…. Works great! Vind ik leuk:LikeWees de eerste om post te […]
ouf… Just tried to follow Christopher Judge (you remember Teal’C from Stargate SG-1? Well that’s him…) His twitter is
First method didn’t work, second didn’t work either. Spend some time to understand what to do in Firefox 9.0.1, and I succeeded! A brief instruction: on twitter’s http page there is first Christoper’s name, next line – his account name and city, and then – his quote in italics. Well, you open the source of this http page (Ctrl+U in Firefox) and search for this quote. Right after the last word of this quote you’ll see
id_str:xxxxxxxxx
where xxxxxxxxx is this number you wanna find.
Good luck!
The fastest way is to do a Google search for something like: find data-user-id twitter. Use one of the services, grab the id and enter it into Google Reader as http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?user_id=101010101 (replace 101010101 with the id, obviously).
Thanks to you and Yury, this was really helpful
Hey – just found this tool:
http://www.idfromuser.com/
It’ll help those of us who don’t know how to read source code.
Your answer, TSW, worked great.
If you subscribe to someone’s twitter account will they be notified when I get their tweets?
The api.twitter.com was the best thank you!
Thank you!!!! Method 2 worked for me.
Herzlichen Dank. Danach habe ich lange gesucht.
thank you for sharing this! (method 2 worked for me)
Hi there!
Method 2 works great with NewsRack.
Thanks a lot for your help. 🙂
Coming late to this party, but you really saved the day for me! Thanks for taking the time to share this!!!!!
I like. This will come in handy when collecting various betting tips. Thanks mate.
Thanks great hack 🙂
Thanks!
Do these work on a mobile device even if i’m using chrome?
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Tweetledee is an approach that works after the Twitter API 1.1 changes:
http://chrissimpkins.github.io/tweetledee/