You no longer get to drink from the firehose. Morons have no longer invaded your screen saver.
Some time recently Twitter turned off the feeds of public twits. Turned them off entirely instead of just rate-limiting them or something. There's a new API to provide a "small random sample of public twits" but it requires authorization via an API key.
Jerks.
Suggestions for a public replacement URL to make be the default text-source in future releases of xscreensaver?
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
The Let Me Google That For You folks have an HTML ticker at live.lmgtfy.com which is amusing - under the hood the data comes from http://live.lmgtfy.com/recent.json. Maybe they would be okay with you using that if asked?
The Twitter Search API doesn't require an API key. See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 for docs, and here's a sample URL to fetch an ATOM feed of @TopTweets:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=from%3ATopTweets
If that API is good, you could also try something like
a OR an OR i OR ?. It seems like this should cover most tweets.Are the TopTweets as interesting as the random ones?
On that note, I was trying to figure out if Tumblr has a "random recent tumbls" feed or API access anywhere, but while it seems to have a well-defined API, that random-recent option seems missing. Pity, because Tumblr might be the one service with even more insanity and drama than LJ ( @TumblrTXT is amazing!)
irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia is the sum total of all human knowledge! That's the Recent Changes feed which is also available in Atom and rss, etc., but maybe that's too detailed to watch just scrolling by. The New Pages might work.
this works for me, great screensaver btw..
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=bbcbreaking
Sadly I am of the understanding that this will also be going away soon (see the API docs).
I've resorted to screen scraping :(
Crap, that's what I rely on to back up tweets (http://jmtd.net/software/twitter/).
identi.ca, maybe?
I almost always used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random as mine.