Twitter has come out with a great idea of allowing you to create “lists” of your favorite people and seeing what all of them are saying within a single view. Twitter is calling this the (unoriginal) “Twitter Lists“. The list idea is great, but for some reason they left out one feature that might make this idea “great”. Right now, you cannot directly create an RSS feed out of the Twitter list. I’m not sure why Twitter didn’t build that into the initial release, but luckily for you, we’ve found a way around that little issue.
Enter one of our old friends, “Dapper Dapp Factory“. One of my first blog posts was a review of the Dapp Factory, and it is still a jewel when you need it. Until Twitter wises up and figures out how great a resource the RSS feed of the Twitter Lists can be, here’s what you need to do.
1. Find the feed you want to turn into an RSS feed:

For our example, we’ll take Nicole Black’s list of “legal-must-follows“

2. Copy the URL for the list and go to Dapper’s Dapp Factory (create a free account if you don’t already have one.) Select “RSS Feed”, then click “Next”

3. On the next page, click “Add to Basket”, then “Next Step” (ignore the message, as we are just going to upload this one web page.)
4. Highlight and click the Twitter Name, then save it as “TwitterName”
5. Highlight and click the “Tweet” portion, then save it as “Tweet”
6. Highlight and click the “Time” portion, then save it as “Date”
7. The results will look like this:
8. Name your “Dapp” and save it
9. Create the RSS feed following this format:
10. Copy and paste the RSS feed into your Google Reader or other RSS resource:
This is not a perfect RSS feed, but this will work nicely until Twitter realizes that creating RSS feeds of the Twitter Lists is a needed resource.
NOTE: Nicole Black also pointed me toward another Twitter List To RSS resource (although it is having some issues, Niki says to keep trying it and it does eventually work. Thanks Niki!!