How to find the RSS feed for any Twitter user

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.