Twitter and Facebook quietly removed RSS, completely

Last year, I talked about how Twitter was becoming increasingly closed and less web-oriented service when they updated the design to attract more users to Twitter.com. Then they cleaned up a noticeable RSS icon and made it so that they could only see the RSS feed by fully logging in and logging into a specific user profile.

After reading my post, Isaac Hepworth , a Twitter developer, tried to reassure me by replying to a message via Buzz:

I talked to people in the company to find out the essence of the problem, so now I can correctly resolve it.

The bottom line is: RSS itself still remains, as it follows from your message.
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Only two things were removed from the new twitter:
1. Link to RSS in the profile.
2. Link to RSS in the profile page metadata (the link element in the head header).

(2) was completely random, and we will fix it. However, the described method of detecting the RSS feed is quite normal and you can still subscribe to the user's feed and read it in Google Reader or another reader by simply adding a profile URL, for example, twitter.com/isaach .

(1) was, in turn, a deliberate act, in accordance with our principle to keep Twitter as simple as possible. With the identification of RSS on the page through the link normally handle most browsers.

Hope this helps!

Unfortunately, apparently, # 2 was not accidental, because it was never repaired. And now the RSS feed has disappeared from the profile altogether, so that it cannot be detected even if you log out and log in to the profile (and in the HTML code, there is also no sign of RSS). It seems that Twitter has completely removed the ability to receive their feeds through the open standard RSS in favor of its proprietary API formats.

At the same time, Facebook seems to have done the same. However, Facebook also removed RSS before, and then returned it back, so the current situation did not come as a surprise. Initially, they had a normal RSS-link to which they could subscribe directly from the profile (the same as in Friendfeed), but there was no such link on the pages of Facebook Pages. After profile redesign, they completely removed the RSS link from there. However, after the last upgrade of Facebook Pages, this link appeared right in groups. I know, because several Facebook Pages groups have been added to my Google Reader and I remember digging in HTML to find the link to RSS in the code. And now it seems that Facebook has again removed the ability to subscribe to groups, thus completely clearing the site of RSS (also in favor of its proprietary Graph API).

People around have long been discussing the topic that "RSS is dead." I wrote that it’s not the RSS that is dead, but the very concept of a “subscription” . However, as more and more sites get rid of RSS in favor of these most proprietary APIs, I’m already afraid that RSS actually dies, not only as an interface for a subscription, but generally as a protocol.

I only hope that both of the above-mentioned sites will change their mind and return the RSS subscription in its place after the next interface upgrade. However, I seem to be the only one who noticed the disappearance of this function, so it is unlikely that they have good reason to return it back. Personally, I think that this is a shame, because now only programmers like me can write code to extract data from Twitter or Facebook, and the average user does not have this possibility.

It seems that in 2011 in the era of Facebook and Twitter we completely stopped caring about open standards. Maybe it’s not just RSS dying, but the whole paradigm of open standards is dying. I think this is very sad and very bad not only for developers, but for all users in general.

APDATE : Dave Stevens shared a way to get RSS through Twitter API, for example: api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=daveisanidiot

The method still works (for more details, see the API documentation ), but its availability is completely in the hands of Twitter developers.

APDATE 2 : If you are not sure about Twitter’s intentions regarding RSS, then look at the help article titled “ How to find your RSS feed ”:

Twitter has recently discontinued support for basic RSS authentication in favor of a more secure OAuth method. You can read more about it here:
blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-applications-and-oauth.html

For this reason, we no longer directly support RSS feeds on Twitter.

If you still want to continue to use RSS feeds from Twitter accounts, we recommend using third-party services.

Or, if you are comfortable with programming, use our tools for developers to get statuses.

From this link you can get information on how to use OAuth to get statuses: dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/home_timeline .

Please note that you need to first register your Twitter application. This can be done here: dev.twitter.com/apps/new .