If you’re like me, then you probably find that your “home” Twitter stream (that is, the tweets of people you follow) is okay, but often contains a lot of noise and not-so-useful info.
What if you were able to see only the tweets that respected web professionals found to be exceptional? Well, you can do that quite easily by viewing a user’s Twitter favorites.
For example, here are a few developers on Twitter that will likely have tons of cool stuff saved in their Twitter favorites:
- Paul Irish
- Chris Coyier
- Elijah Manor
- Estelle Weyl
- Smashing Magazine
- Nicole Sullivan
- Zoran Jambor
- Harry Roberts
- Rey Bango
Of those above, I can vouch for Estelle’s favorites stream. She’s always got cool stuff in there that I’ve been checking out lately. And although Zoran is not as high-profile as the other’s in that list, he’s got some cool stuff in his favorites stream probably to help his research for CSS Weekly.
So that’s just an example list. I’m sure others could come up with a similar bunch of names whose Twitter favorites might be worth a peek.
How Do You Follow Favorites?
Here’s a solution that, unfortunately, will only work until March 2013.
Apparently, you can subscribe to a Twitter user’s favorites via RSS using the following URL syntax:
https://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=ImpressiveWebs
That example uses my Twitter favorites. To change the stream, just change the last part of the URL to match the user whose favorites you want to subscribe to.
But, as mentioned, according to Twitter’s API docs, that API call is now deprecated and those RSS feed links will fail in March 2013.
Kind of a bummer, especially since there doesn’t seem to be an updated method for subscribing to someone’s favorites via RSS. If anyone knows of a simple way to do this, please share.
Is there an app I don’t know about that does this? Or maybe this post can serve as a motivator for someone to build such a tool. Here’s the relevant part of Twitter’s API that you’d need to look into, if you’re interested in this.
This would be an amazing feature to implement in an existing open-source Chrome extension like Silver Bird (https://github.com/cezarsa/silver_bird). I might have next week’s project lined up :)
Personally, I use RSS only, since Twitter only points to useful content on blogs, why not subscribe to those blogs directly? Also, using a news reader I can much more easily track what I’ve read and what not.
In my point of view RSS is the best procedure for implement follow favorites. Thanks for sharing your awesome informative blog.
Thanks, nice technique i’ll try it…
stellar.io for following twitter favorites