It really upsets me when platforms take away functionality that helps automate the world. In this case my ire pointed at Twitter. It use to be if you where at Twitter search and did a search there was a nice RSS feed icon so you could save a feed of your Twitter search to be used wherever it was useful.
Figure 1 – search.twitter.com
Today if you go to Twitter search and perform a search your results show up on a page that is part of your account page.
Figure 2, search results
As you can see Twitter even prepopulates the search box on your page, making search.twitter.com almost useless. The good news is while there is no visual way to figure out you can get an RSS feed, you can!
I have been tracking some searches in my RSS reader and the URLs look like:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Acspenn which is the search – from:cspenn (%3A is a colon )
The common part to all searches is http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=
The bummer is you need to know the % codes for all the special characters like space and colon. But help is available here also.
http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/ is a web app that will generate the link for you.
Figure 3 – sociable.co site
And the output shows up on the top of the refreshed page, along with an ask that you tweet your newly created RSS feed which only seems fair.
Figure 4 – RSS feed results
