MWGK DoT CoM

How to get your tweets in RSS

There are many applications available that give you the ability to read and post tweets on twitter. But I never started using one on a regular basis. I think this is because all the applications I have tried are bound to a single desktop. You could say get a laptop (already got one) and that solves your problem, but my answer would be that I like to travel light.

So there for I’m a intensive user of google apps (more over that in the near future), including the free tools like Google Analytics and Google Reader. When I switched to Google Reader to read my rss feed subscriptions it took a while before I was completely sold.

With the growth and use of twitter I was looking for a easy way to read the tweets of the people I was following. As mentioned I tried the common tools, but they weren’t the One (last week The Matrix was on TV). On the home screen of twitter.com I noticed the little orange box that said rss.

So with the good old copy past keys and google reader I thougt I had ended my search for the right tool. But for some reason the good folks at twitter found it necessary to put basic authentication on the rss friend_timeline feed. As it turned out Google Reader isn’t able to read rss feeds with authentication. I solved this problem by putting Yahoo pipes in the middle.

I was a very happy twitter user until September 1st when twitter (as announced) retired there basic authentication and fully equipped oauth. I tried to modify my yahoo pipes work but the people at yahoo are probably busy with counting there Microsoft $ bucks. Yahoo pipes doesn’t support the use of oauth.

Still looking for a solution or alternative for Google Reader (life goes on) I asked my colleague Elmer what program he used for reading tweets from twitter. He told me he used his iPhone.

After explaining my problem to him we came up with the idea of providing our own rss feed for the twitter friends_timeline. A great programmer as he is a new application called twitter2rss was born.

With Twitter2rss you can read the tweets from the people you follow in your favorite rss reader. Twitter2rss uses the new oauth system and doesn’t store any passwords. In fact this is one of the reasons twitter dumped basic authention for oauth.

So I would say come and get it for free at http://www.twitter2rss.com

follow me on twitter mwgk
follow elmer on twitter ilmart
follow twitter2rss on twitter tweet2rss