> I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it because it's relevant.
Perhaps, but I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer. You could have said:
"I don't have a Twitter account. How would I follow something like this?"
Instead, you chose the more snarky:
"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."
which takes on an almost condescending tone.
Anyway, I've been annoyed myself with the walled garden approach that many of these social sites are taking. Even Facebook has RSS feeds, but it isn't exactly obvious how to get to them. And Twitter seems to be more and more going towards the route of closing off third-party access. But if you're determined enough (and I realize most people won't be; even my finding of the RSS feed was mostly an intellectual exercise), it does appear possible to satisfy your requirements of using your existing Feed system to keep up to date with Twitter posts without having to have a Twitter account.
But like you, I would also have expected that I could simply put the Twitter URL directly into my Reader and have it auto-discover the RSS feed as most proper implementations do. Sadly, this is not the case, and having to somehow know the internals of the Twitter API as a user and not a developer is incredibly convoluted.
Edit: For posterity, I went ahead and removed the snarkiness. Chain broken.
Perhaps, but I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer. You could have said:
"I don't have a Twitter account. How would I follow something like this?"
Instead, you chose the more snarky:
"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."
which takes on an almost condescending tone.
Anyway, I've been annoyed myself with the walled garden approach that many of these social sites are taking. Even Facebook has RSS feeds, but it isn't exactly obvious how to get to them. And Twitter seems to be more and more going towards the route of closing off third-party access. But if you're determined enough (and I realize most people won't be; even my finding of the RSS feed was mostly an intellectual exercise), it does appear possible to satisfy your requirements of using your existing Feed system to keep up to date with Twitter posts without having to have a Twitter account.
But like you, I would also have expected that I could simply put the Twitter URL directly into my Reader and have it auto-discover the RSS feed as most proper implementations do. Sadly, this is not the case, and having to somehow know the internals of the Twitter API as a user and not a developer is incredibly convoluted.
Edit: For posterity, I went ahead and removed the snarkiness. Chain broken.