Twitter has been making it more and more difficult  for users to use their RSS feeds. In its recent  update, Twitter announced that it had stopped  supporting basic authentication over RSS for OAuth.

Since the launch of New Twitter last year, slowly but surely Twitter has been making it more difficult for third party apps to continue to access the service. For example the Ubertwitter application was suspended until it changed its terms of use, and is  now known as ‘Ubersocial.’ Twitter bought out the popular desktop and mobile app Tweetdeck.

With the added functionality of New Twitter, such as their own photo sharing and link shortener services it is questionable how much support Twitter will continue to show for third party app developers.

Twitter has allowed third party app development to thrive in the last few years, which has greatly enhanced the user experience, and Twitter may need to be careful when affecting that experience for users who have become accustomed to using their favourite apps.

The RSS issue may also become an annoyance for some users. Twitter seemed to abandon RSS feeds by taking them down from user profiles, and unlike Facebook, not re-instating them.

In the past there was a small RSS icon underneath that linked to your RSS feed, allowing you to use the link to copy and paste into your other web presences such as your website, blog or LinkedIn group. This made it easy to link your Twitter feed to other social media profiles such as your LinkedIn group. But Twitter has now all but killed off RSS feeds and removed the option from users’ profiles.

I particularly found this Twitter design update to be a great annoyance as I use RSS reader Feedly daily so I can find the appropriate content for my interests on the web. This includes RSS feeds from particular Twitter users.

Luckily, after a little research, it turns out RSS isn’t totally dead on Twitter and there are a couple of easy ways around the issue!

All you need to do to access the RSS feed of a Twitter user is use this link:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={USERNAME}

From The Next Web

As you can see below, here is what I need to type in to access the RSS feed of @reachfurther

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=reachfur...

Thankfully I can easily subscribe to this RSS feed and it will not affect my web experience. RSS allows the information I want to know to come to me, rather than having to search for it. We do not know how long it will be before Twitter puts a halt to RSS altogether, but such an integral part of my web experience as RSS is, I plea to Twitter - please don’t completely kill off RSS!