Creating a Twitter Search, Hashtag, User, Favorites or List RSS Feed
Thanks to muskie for the tip, if you’d rather save yourself hassle and use a third-party, you can search twitter and subscribe to the results using Topsy.
Hashtag and Keyword Search
So, almost every single tutorial told me to just find the magical RSS feed button to get a twitter search, but my understanding is that this button no longer exists! (or it exists for some people and not others, magical…).
So, after much searching, I finally figured it out by changing twitter to the old layout and playing around with the link I found. Sociable has updated their post on this topic, so I’ve updated the cheat sheet a bit:
You may need to use search.atom instead of rss depending on your reader.
[UPDATED: Apr 21, 2012]
Hashtag search: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=%23YourSearch
User mention search: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=%40UserName
To a User: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=to%3AUserName
From a User: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=from%3AUserName
Keyword search: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Your+Keywords
* use OR for any of the word you type, so Your%20OR%20Keywords
* use double quotes for example phrases, so “Your Search“
* use a hyphen for the equivalent of NOT, so -keywordLanguage (for English): http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=lang:en
* to find the two letter language code, just use Twitter’s advance search, select the language of your choice, hit Search, and see what Twitter usesLocation: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?geocode=latitude%2Clongitude%2C25km
(use mi for miles, max 1000km or 1000mi)Location + keyword search: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Your+Keywords%20geocode=latitude%2Clongitude%2C25km
(For a hashtag, add %23 in front of your keyword.)To find the latitude and longitude, try a site like itouchmap.
Check out the Sociable blog post for more on even more complex location searches.
Making Complex Searches
Here’s my tip on generating more complex searches: use Twitter’s advance search, see what Twitter comes up with in the search bar, then copy/paste that after: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=
The only exception is the geocode, because Twitter has “near this place” instead of exact geolocation.
User Timelines & Favourites
If you’re interested in a user’s timeline, many readers will allow you to use the standard profile page link: http://twitter.com/#!/username . If for some reason that doesn’t work, try this:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/User.rss
Replace ‘User’ with either the username or the user ID. There are a number of sites that can show you a user’s id, such as idfromuser.comSimilarly, for favorites, use:
http://twitter.com/favorites/User.rss
Thanks to the socialble and tweetsmarter posts.
Twitter List
If you’re interested in creating RSS feeds to a list instead of just a single person, try going through David Calhoun’s The incredibly painful way of getting an RSS feed of a Twitter list.
Gracias!
Daniel
September 16, 2011 at 7:01 am
Awesome tip. I searched for a over an hour to learn how to do this and then I found your blog. I tweeted your post!
Mary Iannotti
September 29, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Thanks for the tweet ^^
Cynthia
September 30, 2011 at 10:31 am
Very useful. I turns out that at long last google reader has a feature to easily create these feeds, just click browse for stuff.
Antonio Piccolboni
March 10, 2012 at 7:49 pm
That’s true, but I find that it doesn’t always work. I’ve had problems with actually adding the feed (it’ll just give an error) and sometimes even finding users.
Cynthia
March 10, 2012 at 7:51 pm
How do I create an RSS feed for example of the word: Toyota with the location being only in australia. Basically I want Tweets to only be of people talking about Toyota in Australia. My issue is trying to get the geocode for Australia only. Really would appreciate any help!
Sean
April 14, 2012 at 4:30 am
If you follow the format, you’d probably put something along the lines of: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=toyota%20geocode%3A25.274398%2C133.775136%2C1000mi
The problem for trying to search the whole country is that Twitter allows a maximum distance of 1000. You would probably have to do two searches for different geopoints to cover the country. If you’re only interested in one region/coast, you could just use something like itouchmap: http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to find the latitude and longitude of where you’re interested in and optionally, replace the distance.
Cynthia
April 14, 2012 at 7:58 am
You can use Topsy to search Twitter and then get an RSS feed of the results.
muskie
April 19, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Thanks for the tip!
Cynthia
April 19, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Hello,
my question is kind of similar to Seans.
I need an rss with all tweets about a company, say toyota (with hastag), but in a certain language. In my case: german.
The URL I get from the Twitter Search “#toyota lang:de” would be :
https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23toyota%20lang%3Ade
I tried to fix a URL the way you showed above, but none of my rss-readers (thunderbird mail, google reader, hootsuite) accepts it. It only works without the “lang”-Part…
Any Ideas how it could work?
I’d be very grateful for any kind of answer
Thanks so far!
Steven
steven carthy (@stevenl33)
April 21, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Not sure exactly what you tried, but this worked for me: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=%23toyota%20lang%3Ade
If I put that in my browser’s address bar, it asks me what I want to use to subscribe to the feed.
Let me know though whether that works.
Cynthia
April 21, 2012 at 5:15 pm
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