I think RSS is a great way for a high-volume information user to stay on top of things without too much time or work. But RSS is in decline, slowly being replaced by social sharing and proprietary feeds. To me, social sharing is like browsing, while RSS lets you look at every book on the shelf. Each has a valid use, each is unique.
If you would like to continue to use RSS with Twitter, here’s some information on how to create an RSS Feed for a Twitter user:
This article from TheNextWeb shows how to create an RSS feed for a single Twitter user or account. If you want to create a feed for my Twitter account (@davidkamerer) then the syntax for the feed would look like this:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=davidkamerer
Many Twitter searches are likely to be keyword-driven rather than account-driven, however. Twitter’s advanced search has a lovely interface to help you pull a specific, tailored search. Now we really miss that RSS feed! However, TheInfoBabe has created a “cheat sheet” that you can modify to obtain the RSS you need. Here’s a sample feed that includes location and keywords:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?geocode=40.744544%2C-74.027593%2C5.0mi&q=+research+paper+near%3A%22hoboken%2C+nj%22+within%3A5mi
But bad news – while the resulting feed will load into my RSS reader, it returns a 403 error. I will continue to work on this and post an update when I figure it out. Other sample feeds from TheInfoBabe do work, so be sure to check them out.
You can also pull RSS from Twitter searches from some third-party sites. I have had success with Topsy and IceRocket.
If you have additional resources to share, please comment below. Thanks!
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