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How To Follow Any Twitter List In An RSS Reader

Twitter is a nice tool for social networking. A lot of information is aggregated on twitter. It can be quite an overwhelming information stream. Since Twitter has introduced twitter lists it is possible to structure the information a bit further. However, the list feature is somewhat private to the person who manages the list. 

I just found a nice way to fetch your twitter lists using RSS feeds - err. Atom feeds. For most feed readers is does not matter if you dump RSS or ATOM feeds. The cool thing about this is that you don't need to work around with third party services such as reported here or here. You can simply use Twitter's very own functions.

 

To get your feed you can use the following URL.

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.atom?slug=YOURLISTNAME&owner_screen_name=LISTMANAGERNAME

You need to replace YOURLISTNAME with the name of your list. Also you need to replace the LISTMANAGERNAME with your twitter name, or the name of the person who organises the list.

 You can try out the result with my mlearning twitter-list that listens to the following URL.

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.atom?slug=mlearning&owner_screen_name=phish108

It is even possible to fetch the information as a JSON object, which makes it really easy to use this information on your web-page or blog. In order to do so, just replace the .atom to.json, like I did for my mlearning list

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.json?slug=mlearning&owner_screen_name=phish108