Twitter Feeds support http if-modified-since

When looking at the twitter feeds today I noticed that they support http if-modified-since. Type in the following in your shell:

$ curl -z "20070312 00:00:00 CET"
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/663633.rss

and it returns:

http://twitter.com/lemonad
Twitter updates from lemonad
en-us
40


lemonad: This is a message
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:11:34 +0000
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6883771
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6883771



lemonad: This is another message
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:15:46 +0000
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6806561
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6806561

but if you instead type:

$ curl -z "20070312 02:00:00 CET"
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/663633.rss

you will get the following result:

http://twitter.com/lemonad
Twitter updates from lemonad
en-us
40


lemonad: This is a message
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:11:34 +0000
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6883771
http://twitter.com/lemonad/statuses/6883771

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s any way of getting back more than 20 items, no matter what date and time is used.

20070313: Add ?count=n to the end of the feed url where n is the number of entries you want. This way you can get a lot more than 20 entries.

20070318: From the Twitter Development Talk group:

Wow, Jonas, you found that recent addition before we even documented it! You totally get a gold star :)
–
Alex Payne
Obvious
http://twitter.com/al3x

By the way, if you haven’t already got SXSW- and twitter-induced ADD or you’re willing to live with it, then by all means feel free to add me!