Creating an RSS feed of a User’s Twitter Timeline

.

Nov 30, 2012 Update: Sorry, while the solution described below worked for a number of months, it no longer works after recent changes Twitter made.

.

Creating an RSS feed of a specific user’s Twitter timeline used to be easy – the RSS link was right there on the user’s profile. With the move to New Twitter, the RSS link disappeared.

Since a couple of people asked this week about adding a feed of a specific Twitter user’s posts to Google Reader, we thought we’d share the easy solution we use.

First, you need the user’s Twitter ID number.

To find the ID number for any user, paste the following link in to your browser:

http://api.twitter.com/users/show/username.json

Make sure to replace “username” with the actual username you are looking for.

So, for @socialirl you would use the link:

http://api.twitter.com/users/show/socialirl.json

The user’s ID number will show up towards the end of the page. See the text highlighted in red below:

 

.

Once you have the ID number simply add a new subscription to Google Reader or other RSS reader, and use the following link:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/XXXXX.rss

Replace XXXXX with the user’s ID number and you should be set.