I am consolidating all of my social networking to Google+, but I do get a lot of value from Twitter. This value largely comes in the form of links, since Twitter is barely useful for actual conversations, so I don’t want to lose this ability, but I don’t want to continually have to open Twitter and scroll through the stream to catch up.
I spend a lot of my time in Google Reader, so the easiest way to deal with this would be to add a Twitter folder in Google Reader and then take in an RSS feed of each person I follow. It turns out this is actually pretty easy.
Twitter already has baked into it’s API the ability to pull a stream from any account. For instance, to pull an RSS feed of my account use this url:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=elroyjetsonNow simply subscribe to the RSS feed in Google Reader, attach a label, and problem solved.
Update – 12/30/2012
This method seemed to stop working when subscribing in Google Reader at some point. It does, however, still work with a minor tweak. I create a proxy using PHP which the reaches out and pulls in the feed and this seem to then work.
<?php
$feed = file_get_contents('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=elroyjetson');
echo $feed;
?>
For whatever reason, this makes it work.