Follow Your Twitter ‘@’ Replies via a Feedreader

This doesn’t seem to be widely known, but it’s a great Twitter feature. If you use Twitter, you probably know that you can go to twitter.com/replies to see a list of “@yourusername” replies to your tweets — including those from people who follow you but whom you don’t follow. A better way to follow these replies is via an XML feed: twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss for RSS format, twitter.com/statuses/replies.atom for Atom format. Both feeds are protected by HTTP authentication; use your Twitter username and password to read them. (This “switch the .rss extension to .atom” trick works for all other Twitter feeds, too.)

★ Sunday, 24 June 2007