Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Twitter: No Usable RSS Feed

Twitter is simple. It lets you do only two things:

  1. Post a 140 character status message.
  2. See the status of the people you are following (to use the right Twitter terminology).
How to do that?
  1. Updating your status must be one of those operations you can do really fast. I don't want to go to a web site for that. I imagine a dashboard widget would work nicely. I tested two (Twitterlex and Twidget). They both are not quite usable. IM is another option, but only GTalk/Jabber is officially supported, and it works only if you have a single Twitter account.
  2. Twitter provides an RSS feed with the updates of those you are following. But you need to be authenticated to read it. So that feed won't work online feed readers, such as Google Reader. Bummer.
What's the opposite of so far so good?