Steve Gibson of Security Now fame just created a new twitter account (@SGreads) for posting the stories he finds interesting. Now I could follow him on Twitter, but that is pretty useless. Trying to follow somebody on Twitter is like trying to drink out of a fire hose — most of the posts miss your eyes. People who infrequently post well thought out tweets are missed in the torrent of useless blabbering of people who tweet what they had for supper. To follow people I really like I use Google Reader.
To add a twitter stream to Google Reader used to be as easy as entering the persons twitter handle, but for some reason that just isn’t working anymore. So after a few wild goose chases on Google, I finally found this site that showed my how to get a working rss feed from somebodies twitter stream.
You just enter a URL of this pattern in you address bar:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx
Where xxxxx is the users twitter name. in this case I used SGreads like this:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=SGreads
When you verify that this brings you to an rss feed, enter this address into the subscribe box in Google Reader. Be sure to use http:// because https:// doesn’t seem to work right.
Only works with public streams right? Otherwise I think the browser would have to be logged into Twitter in another window or tab.
You could also put the people you really like into Twitter lists.
Jeff, I already use lists, but between checking email, G+, Google Reader, Facebook, all for several different accounts, Twitter just gets lost, because it is the least useful of all the others I mentioned.
This way I can use Google Reader, my favorite way of getting new information, to check on the few people I find worth following religiously on twitter
Yes, this only works for public streams as far as I know