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:

1. whether I am interested in this account's tweets
2. whether this account's tweets include at least some degree of real-time relevance
3. 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.