Twitter and RSS

Why do I want this? Well, shameless self promotion here, I make a feed reader called Stream. It allows you to subscribe to RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed, so you can bring content to your feed reader instead of visiting a bunch of individual sites.

I Love RSS! That’s about the best I can describe it. RSS, and the other types, are open formats and allow data to travel freely across the web. If Twitter supported RSS again feed reader users could subscribe to individual feeds to get updates from folks they follow.

I would like to have it so I could subscribe to my Politics Twitter List. It’s full of news sources I like to read occasionally and don’t really interact with. If I would like to interact with a particular account tweet I could open right to it in the browser and respond.

This is more of a passive approach than Twitter would probably like us to have but it sure opens us up to other ways of following news, which Twitter is really good at.

Sure, I could build functionality directly into Stream to hook into the Twitter API but it would be easier to use an open format that is tried and true fabric of the web.

Twitter has the ability to easily generate a feed when they update a Twitter stream. It’s just text in a specific format that’s easy to build. And, believe it or not, they used to it!

I’m certain developers of feed readers would appreciate the effort. ❤️