Today we noticed that a Twitter feed on one of our customer’s sites had stopped working. On closer inspection the PHP code used to interpret the feed was failing to find any relevant terms. Viewing the feed in a browser quickly highlighted that Twitter had stopped the feed. The URL of the feed that was being used was in the following format (the customer’s username has been replaced by ‘MamuComputing’):
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=MamuComputing&count=3
Which then displays the following:
Fortunately, the Twitter RSS feed hasn’t been turned off, merely moved. After changing the URL of the feed to the format below everything worked fine again.
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=MamuComputing&count=3
Although, with Twitter disabling Tweets feeding into LinkedIn and Facebook turning off RSS feeds, both earlier this year, we will be considering a different approach to Twitter feeds for our customers.