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Google reader twitter RSS broken?
RSS feeds of twitter users have stopped updating in Google Reader. They did work up until a week or so ago.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Yes, Twitter made a change which they talked about on the Twitter Status blog last week. Because of this change, the RSS feed for our Recent (aka with-friends) stream now requires authentication (i.e., you need a valid username and password to access it).
Relevant excerpt:
It’s still possible for users to receive their own With Friends timelines, but authentication is required. What we did not anticipate was that some users were subscribing to these feeds in readers. Most readers do not support authentication, so the feeds that these folks were subscribing have since broken.
Google Reader, unfortunately, does not yet handle feeds that require authentication. You can find a list of RSS readers that support authentication in this related thread. -
Inappropriate?I'm not following the "With Friends" but the plain vanilla feeds for the twitter users.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Does the RSS feed you're subscribed to have 'friends_timeline' in it? If yes, then that's the 'with-friends' feed that I was referring to.
You can test it for yourself by doing this.
1. Go to any user profile other than your own. For example: try @pacificIT.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of his profile page and look for the RSS box
3. Copy the URL in the RSS box and replace the text 'user_timeline' with 'friends_timeline'
You'll find that you can access the user_timeline of any public Twitter account without authentication, but you need authentication to see any friends_timeline, even your own.
If you were to try clicking on your own RSS box under the Recent tab, the Twitter API will ask you for your username and password, even if you're already logged into the Twitter website.
If you look at your own Twitter home page under the Recent tab and scroll down to get your RSS feed, you'll see that it's also a friends_timeline RSS.
I’m not sure that explains it clearly but I hope it helps.
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Inappropriate?They are definitely not the friends timeline feeds. I just looked at it and they all say user_timeline.
I'm not a twitter user, I just follow the RSS feeds of these twitter users and therefore don't want to use authentication to view any of the feeds.
I’m really angry
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Inappropriate?At the risk of angering you further (believe me, that's not my intent!), I suggest you log a support ticket with Twitter via http://twitter.com/help
Afaik, you don't have to be a Twitter user to create a ticket. You just have to give them a valid email address so they can get back to you with an answer.
It would probably help Twitter if you gave them the username(s) of the people that you're trying to follow so they have some basis for investigating.
At this point, the only thing I can think of is that the user(s) you're following used to have a public account and they recently decided to make the account private, thereby locking their RSS feeds.
However, I don't know if that is indeed the case and further speculation on my part is only bound to anger you further, so I will just end by saying good luck and I hope your problem gets fixed.
Edited to add:
If you'd rather not go through the trouble of creating the ticket via that form, you can also send an email to support AT twitter DOT com. It's my understand that such an email will create a ticket in the help system -
Inappropriate?Just to add, lordgilman might not be the only one.
I've seen this myself and some of my friends, who subscribe to my Twitter feed (not the friend's feedline) also reported that they haven't seen any updates in a while too.1 Comment
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This answers the question
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Thomas, thanks for that additional info. -
Inappropriate?As is turns out this was (at least partly) a Google Reader problem. We should be crawling individual user timeline feeds normally again (you should be seeing updates over the next few hours).
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
2 people say
this answers the question
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This answers the question
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Mihai,
Thanks for getting back to us. My wife and friends are seeing tweets again in GR, yay! :-) -
That's wonderful news! Thanks for posting an update here, Mihai. 8-)
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This answers the question
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Yes, it was working for a while but for the past week or so I've got nothing. I've unmarked all of my "this answers the questions" because this problem has clearly not been fixed.
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Inappropriate?If you're willing to run a cron job to get your friends RSS feed, you could do so the way I do with the twitter api. Details at my blog entry about it.
Basically, you use the twitter api to authenticate and get the feed, then save the feed someplace where Google Reader can access it.3 Comments Add a comment
This answers the question
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Thanks for the information! That's a pretty straightforward solution.
However, to those reading this thread I want to make it clear there is still a bug between Twitter and Google Reader. As an example here are two of my feeds:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time...
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time...
The first one hasn't updated in 3 weeks in Reader (but has multiple daily updates) while the second one is going through even if it's a bit lagged. -
@lordgilman, I can reproduce your problem. That sucks. Also note that the Atom feeds you provided do not validate at http://feedvalidator.org. But BarbInNebraska's RSS feed does validate and is still wrong in Google Reader. http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time.... Now *that's* definitely not Twitter's fault. The feed is good and current. That complaint has to go to Google.
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I've mentioned this ticket on Google Reader's support group as a reply to someone else who seemed to have the same problem. You can see the thread at http://groups.google.com/group/google...
It also looks like I broke Get Satisfaction, one of mdy's responses up above shows "You and -1 other people have found this helpful." Today's been a productive day! -
Inappropriate?I've been having the same problem for over a month now!
But it seems to happen only for *some* twitter IDs. It's
consistently broken for "burhop" but consistently works
for "CaliLewis" for example.
Google gurus please fix!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Inappropriate?google reader can't use rss with authentication.
I use yahoo pipes to get the feed with autentication, then feed my google reader with the yahoo pipe rss.
yay.
I’m happy
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This answers the question
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this isn't about the feeds that need authentication and that was determined at the beginning of the thread.
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lordgilman, it may please you to know that yahoo pipes has a similar problem (http://blog.pipes.yahoo.net/2008/07/2...) to the one google reader has. :) And FWIW, those of us searching the web for solutions to the "with friends" issue keep winding up here. So it's handy that that fix can be found here. Your pain has brought some relief to others.
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Thanks, bombox - it works for me now! So perhaps even if the problem wasn't directly authentication-related, the Pipes solution can help, at least for some people.
I'd never used Pipes before, so in case it's of use to anyone else, here's what I did:
* Logged into Pipes
* Created a new Pipe.
* Dragged "Fetch feed" onto the grid
* Connected its "Items" output to the Pipe Output object
* In the URL field of the "Fetch Feed" box, I entered the RSS URL for my "Me plus friends" feed, adding in my twitter username and password, so that it looked something like this: "http://myusername:mypassword@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/9999999.rss".
* Selected "Debugger: Pipe Output" from the bottom right of the screen, and checked that the resulting feed looked OK.
* Hit "Save", entering an appropriate name.
* "Back to my Pipes"
* Moused over the new pipe, and then selected the "View results" thing that appeared.
* Clicked on the "+Google" button at the top.
* Went through the usual steps for adding something to Google Reader.
...and as I said, everything worked.
Hope this helps. -
Poor lordgilman, we keep talking about the authentication issue. Anyway, to further expand what gpjt says, you can also use private strings to keep your username or password private while sharing the pipe. Here's how: http://dblume.livejournal.com/112262....
