The developer created a tool to return RSS to Twitter

Earlier this month, entrepreneur and blogger Jesse Stei noticed that Facebook and Twitter completely removed RSS support from their sites. After many protests in the tech community, Facebook changed its mind and again added RSS links to Facebook pages. Twitter didn’t react at all.

But now, one developer has created a tool that uses the Twitter API to create RSS feeds. A project code called “Twitter API 2 RSS” is available on GitHub here .

Twitter killed RSS

According to Stei, Twitter has been phasing out RSS support for some time. Last year, Twitter developer Isaac Hepworth told Stey that links to RSS feeds were only removed from profile pages, and links in the metadata remain. Hepworth said their temporary removal was "random" and they will be returned shortly.

But, as Stei writes, the links were never returned, and he could not find any traces of RSS in the HTML source. This led him to conclude that Twitter really killed all the tech support. Twitter help confirms this : "Twitter no longer directly supports RSS feeds."

Stei noted that developers can access RSS via the Twitter API, which may be the last resort to receive an RSS feed from a Twitter site outside of third-party services.

Twitter API 2 RSS

Now another developer, Sean McCollum, did just that. The Twitter API 2 RSS, available as a code snippet (gist), is ready for testing. The code was written for personal use when he wanted to create his own RSS feeds for Twitter profiles, better quality and more functional.

When McCollum found out that Twitter was removing RSS support, he realized that his code could be rewritten for others to use. The only problem now is that he does not know how to overcome the API limit of 150 requests per hour from one IP address. He is looking for ideas to help solve this.

Now tech-savvy users can run the Twitter API 2 RSS code and subscribe to feeds in Google Reader or any other RSS reader. For end users, the code is not yet available as a service. Details on how to use the code are available here on McCollam's blog.

Here's what it looks like in action: