Twitter Favorites RSS Feeds

Twitter dropped RSS feeds in early 2013 (Mashable) and never had direct support for RSS feeds from favorites. I still use Twitter favorites as a bookmark or “read it later” service for myself and have been running the Tweetfave service for over 2 years now. Tying these ideas together, I’ve just rolled out Twitter favorites RSS feed support in Tweetfave.

How it Works

Tweetfave periodically scans your account (using the official API) and summarizes all favorited tweets in an email. Now the system will also update a feed which can be used with other systems that accept standard RSS feeds.

The RSS feed will be created with each tweet contained in an item element with the following fields set:

• title – text version of the tweet
• description – text version of the tweet, plus a link to the original tweet
• content:encoded – HTML version of the tweet, plus a link to the original tweet
• link – the first link mentioned in the tweet (see Notes below)
• guid – same as link
• pubDate – date/time of the original tweet

Here’s a screenshot of my favorites feed shown in Firefox:

Setup Instructions

For existing Tweetfave users:

1. Visit the Tweetfave login page
2. Sign in to Twitter (if needed) and approve the Tweetfave App
3. Copy the link for “Twitter favorites RSS feed”

For new Tweetfave users:

1. Visit the Tweetfave login page
2. Sign in to Twitter (if needed) and approve the Tweetfave App
3. Enter your email and click Submit
4. Mark a couple of tweets as favorite to get started
5. Within a couple hours you should get your first email from Tweetfave
6. Now return using the “existing users” steps above to grab your RSS feed link

What to Do

So what can be done now that you have an RSS feed of your Twitter favorites? I like to use IFTTT which is an awesome application for connecting different services together. (For a great overview, see their About IFTTT page).

I’ve set up my recipes where the source trigger is a new item in the RSS feed and the target is a service like Instapaper, Paper, or Evernote. You can configure the fields and formatting sent to various services, giving you lots of different options.

Notes

Here are a few notes and caveats to keep in mind:

• If you’re a new Tweetfave user, you need to favorite at least one tweet first, and wait for the first email before your feed link is created
• Your RSS feed link is somewhat obfuscated so that people can’t guess it. It’s also only shown to you after login, so you can still keep your favorites stream private.
• If a favorited tweet has multiple links, you will have multiple RSS items (because each one can only have one link). This seems like a good compromise even at the expense of some extra entries.
• The time between favoriting a tweet and it appearing in your feed is not instant; Tweetfave currently scans everything at 2-hour intervals, then sends emails and updates the feeds.
• If you disable your Tweetfave account, the RSS feed file will still be online but won’t be updated. If you’d like the file removed, just email me.

Feedback

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone trying this out, including any interesting use cases people come up with!