Let me subscribe to a Twitter account like just another RSS feed.

idea
#1

It would be awesome if I could tell NewsBlur to subscribe to @BloombergNews or @BBCBreaking so I could see all their tweets in much the same way that I see any other website. There are some Twitter accounts that are really volume, so I don’t want to follow them. Likewise, there are some Twitter accounts that tweet once a week, but I don’t want to miss those tweets.

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#2

Unfortunately Twitter intentionally removed their RSS feeds years ago. You used to be able to just add the twitter.com/{user} URL and the feed was still rep’ed for discovery in the raw (non-JS-app) HTML, but that’s not been true for ages, as well.

I think there are some external services to RSSify twitter feeds via their API, but I’m not sure.

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#3

Worse yet, their TOS expressly prohibit clients that mix TWTR content inline with other content, so there would have to be all sorts of weird changes or restrictions on how you can use these feeds. :frowning:

#4

I use http://www.rssitfor.me/ to accomplish this, ie: subscribe to http://www.rssitfor.me/getrss?name=ne… instead of @newsblur

#5

That sounds like a pretty cool workaround. Its a bummer their site is returning a 502 error right now.

#6

Ahh, i think i figured it out. I tried to include the @ symbol. I left that off and it worked as expected. Good find.

#7

You can also try http://iag.me/twools/ if you can host it somewhere

#8

I competitor RSS Reader, called “Bazqux” already support this (twitter rss). I use it and i love it. This is the only thing that stops me from swiching to NewsBlur.

Therefore I see no restriction from twitter. NewsBlur should be able to implement the feature.

#9

Like other comments mentioned, it’s against Twitter’s TOS, and as NewsBlur is a much bigger site than Bazqux (and in the same city), I’d get disconnected from the API whereas a smaller site can fly under the radar. I’m unwilling to do things that are against another site’s ToS.

#10

Sam, one could say the same about showing full text articles for websites that only provide partial RSS feeds. That’s against their TOS as well. (I am actually very happy about that feature.) Why the double standards?

#11

Twitter locked up their API behind a ton of crappy restrictions before their IPO. It would be nice to have this but I doubt Samuel would ever want to be under Twitters thumb.

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