How is this not arcane magic, though? Twitter should have used a meta tag so that the RSS feed would be auto-discovered by any relatively modern RSS client. But their recent actions suggest that their interest is not making it easy to use third-party systems outside of Twitter proper. I think icebraining's point is a legitimate one, because it isn't obvious that RSS exists in the first place.
Typing two words into the worlds most popular website which is used 400 million times per day and reading the answer to the first result returned is pretty much the exact opposite of arcane magic in my book.
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say then, and I don't want to assume you are trolling, so I'll try again.
Your link [1] referred to a post which specifically said: "Last month, without warning, Facebook and Twitter killed-off access to RSS feeds. With the launch of the new Twitter interface, you could only access RSS feeds on Twitter if you were logged out of your account. Now, it seems you can’t access them at all. [... followed by a work around ...]"
Furthermore, it then goes on to say: "The process doesn’t work in all instances. Google Reader was unable to recognize the RSS feed." But this isn't a true statement, so now the information is actually misleading.
That seems to echo what I've been saying as well. There used to be an obvious way using established practices to access Twitter via RSS that was auto-discoverable by RSS clients and Web browsers. Now there is not. Judging by the number of RSS-related comments generated in this thread alone, it seems like a legitimate gripe, particularly since adding a simple meta tag isn't exactly an onerous burden.
I believe they used to (pre previous design.. so pre 2008ish).
However, I imagine with the advent of the thin-client AJAXification of the entire site, they don't dynamically create meta tags for this purpose (indeed, I'm not even sure if browsers would support this).
