[icebraining]

Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know.

And before you tell me how I expect to follow Twitter accounts without one of my own, let me tell you that I follow dozens of blogs without having an account in any of them or their platforms.

[barik]

"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

I think Twitter is absolutely the right way to go on something like this. Your post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS. [1] Does your reader not support RSS? (Okay, okay, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since it actually __isn't__ all that obvious that Twitter does support it; I had to Google it myself).

[1] Here's the one for shit_hn_says: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/752430234.rss

Add it to Google Reader and enjoy! You don't need a Twitter account, so your major concern should be alleviated at this point.

[icebraining]

I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it because it's relevant.

Your post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS [2]. Does your blog client not support RSS?

It does, I just wasn't aware that Twitter supported RSS, since nowhere in the page (not even in the source) do they link to it. Can one find its URL without doing arcane magic?

That said, the I do agree that Twitter is a decent place to publish these, although it still has the length limit that prevents them from putting links to the comments.

[barik]

> I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it because it's relevant.

Perhaps, but I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer. You could have said:

"I don't have a Twitter account. How would I follow something like this?"

Instead, you chose the more snarky:

"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

which takes on an almost condescending tone.

Anyway, I've been annoyed myself with the walled garden approach that many of these social sites are taking. Even Facebook has RSS feeds, but it isn't exactly obvious how to get to them. And Twitter seems to be more and more going towards the route of closing off third-party access. But if you're determined enough (and I realize most people won't be; even my finding of the RSS feed was mostly an intellectual exercise), it does appear possible to satisfy your requirements of using your existing Feed system to keep up to date with Twitter posts without having to have a Twitter account.

But like you, I would also have expected that I could simply put the Twitter URL directly into my Reader and have it auto-discover the RSS feed as most proper implementations do. Sadly, this is not the case, and having to somehow know the internals of the Twitter API as a user and not a developer is incredibly convoluted.

Edit: For posterity, I went ahead and removed the snarkiness. Chain broken.

[icebraining]

I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer.

But my post was itself snarky in response to narcan's "Pro-tip". It's a snark chain!

[res0nat0r]

> Can one find its URL without doing arcane magic?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=twitter+rss&l=1

[barik]

How is this not arcane magic, though? Twitter should have used a meta tag so that the RSS feed would be auto-discovered by any relatively modern RSS client. But their recent actions suggest that their interest is not making it easy to use third-party systems outside of Twitter proper. I think icebraining's point is a legitimate one, because it isn't obvious that RSS exists in the first place.

[res0nat0r]

Typing two words into the worlds most popular website which is used 400 million times per day and reading the answer to the first result returned is pretty much the exact opposite of arcane magic in my book.

[barik]

I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say then, and I don't want to assume you are trolling, so I'll try again.

Your link [1] referred to a post which specifically said: "Last month, without warning, Facebook and Twitter killed-off access to RSS feeds. With the launch of the new Twitter interface, you could only access RSS feeds on Twitter if you were logged out of your account. Now, it seems you can’t access them at all. [... followed by a work around ...]"

Furthermore, it then goes on to say: "The process doesn’t work in all instances. Google Reader was unable to recognize the RSS feed." But this isn't a true statement, so now the information is actually misleading.

That seems to echo what I've been saying as well. There used to be an obvious way using established practices to access Twitter via RSS that was auto-discoverable by RSS clients and Web browsers. Now there is not. Judging by the number of RSS-related comments generated in this thread alone, it seems like a legitimate gripe, particularly since adding a simple meta tag isn't exactly an onerous burden.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/06/23/how-to-find-the-rss...

[petercooper]

I believe they used to (pre previous design.. so pre 2008ish).

However, I imagine with the advent of the thin-client AJAXification of the entire site, they don't dynamically create meta tags for this purpose (indeed, I'm not even sure if browsers would support this).