Following on Twitter Using RSS
When I am trying to decide whether to follow a given account on Twitter or not, I usually look at the following three criteria:
- whether I am interested in this account's tweets
- whether this account's tweets include at least some degree of real-time relevance
- whether this account can participate in a discussion
Turns out however there are plenty of accounts that are missing properties #2 and/or #3. Bots that tweet links on a specific topic, for example. Or a celebrity comedian such as @shitmydadsays - this account probably won’t respond to any mentions and the tweets are rarely real-time sensitive.
I found it’s much more efficient to consume such tweets not via Twitter, but via RSS. Twitter used to include a feed on every account’s home page but not anymore. Here is how you can follow a Twitter account via RSS.
Let’s say you want to follow @StephenAtHome.
Open this link in your browser:
https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name=StephenAtHome
(If you prefer JSON, use https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=StephenAtHome).
Note user id value - for @StephenAtHome it’s 16303106.
Then add the following feed to your reader:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16303106.rss
This method helps me better manage my Twitter reading experience by ensuring real-time sensitive content and conversations go to Tweetdeck and the rest ends up in Google Reader.