How to Create RSS Feeds for Twitter

twitter has dropped support for RSS Feeds but there is a simple solution that you can use to generate RSS feeds for your various Twitter streams including Twitter search results, user timelines, favorites and even Twitter lists.

Without RSS feeds, it is difficult to use your Twitter data elsewhere. For instance, you can no longer create recipes in IFTTT that get triggered when there’s a new tweet that @mentions you. You cannot import your Twitter timeline automatically into your blog. You cannot track Twitter search results for certain keywords in your RSS reader.

How to Create RSS Feeds in Twitter

The trick is simple. Twitter offers HTML and JavaScript based widgets to help you embed user timelines and Twitter search results into your website.  What we’ll do is transform these Twitter widgets into regular RSS Feeds with the help of aGoogle Script. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. From your Twitter homepage, go to Settings -> Widgets (link) and create a new widget. You can create widgets for user timelines, favorites, Twitter list and search results.
2. Once the new widget is published, make a note of the widget ID which you can find in the URL of the widget. It is a long string of numbers.
3. Click here to make a copy of the Google Script in your Google and choose Run -> Twitter_RSS to initialize and authorize the script. You’ve to do this only once.
4. Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App and click the “Save New Version” button. SetAnyone, including Anonymous under Who has access to the app and hit Deploy.

Google Script will now create a unique URL for your RSS web app that will look something like https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABCD/exec.

Just append the Twitter Widget ID (created in Step 2) to this URL and your RSS feed for Twitter is ready. For instance, if the Twitter widget ID is 123456, your RSS Feed URL would be:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABCD/exec?123456

The Twitter RSS feed will have all details about the tweet including the date when that tweet was posted, the full name, user name and profile picture of the Twitter user and the actual text of the tweet.

Should you wish to create another RSS Feed for Twitter, just add another widget and use that new widget’s ID with your Google Script URL.

Related tutorial: Archive Tweets to Google Sheets

You can subscribe to the Twitter RSS feed inside Feedly or use it as for an IFTTT recipe. However, FeedBurner is unable to parse RSS feeds generated throughGoogle Scripts.

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