Last month, without warning, Facebook and Twitter killed-off access to RSS feeds. With the launch of the new Twitter interface, you could only access RSS feeds on Twitter if you were logged out of your account. Now, it seems you can’t access them at all.
Whether intentional or not, this is not a surprising move on Twitter’s part. It has been hard at work ensuring that any interaction with its services adheres to a particular vision. Twitter has been cracking down on third-party apps, or simply buying them out, all in an effort to streamline the Twitter experience, it would seem.
While Facebook quickly reinstated the RSS feeds as quietly as they took them away, Twitter doesn’t appear to have followed suit.
Luckily, there is a very easy-to-use workaround that will give you instant access to Twitter RSS feeds, although it may only be a matter of time before Twitter kills that off too.
To access the RSS feed of any user, use the following link:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={USERNAME}
So for example, if you want to access the RSS feed of The Next Web’s Twitter account, you would use the following link:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=thenextweb
The process doesn’t work in all instances. Google Reader was unable to recognize the RSS feed. On the other hand, it worked flawlessly with the WordPress RSS widget, giving you an easy way to get your latest Tweets onto your WordPress blog.
Have you found another workaround for Twitter’s RSS blockade? Let us know in the comments.















I recently created an article discussing an alternative way to obtain the RSS feed of a Twitter users. you can read the simple steps here http://einfo.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-to-find-twitter-rss-feed.html
thanx for this. i didn’t know twitter also had a RSS feed! :)
I built a tool in php that will generate an rss feed from the api. http://www.tubejumper.com/index.php/2011/05/27/twitter-api-2-rss/ primarily because the rss feeds twitter generates are bland.
Great! Next step: Anyone knows how to create the RSS from a twitter list?
here’s an example of one https://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.atom?slug=super-mobile-users&owner_screen_name=scobleizer&include_entities=true&include_rts=true&count=200
Thanks for the tips re: user feeds, but has anyone figured out a way to access RSS feeds for search results?
http://search.twitter.com/api/
Very usefull, thanks !!
Works with Horus rss reader on symbian