Free My Feed frees your password-protected RSS feeds for use in online readers

If you're an avid Google Reader fan, you might want to read your friends' Twitter updates in Google Reader alongside your other subscriptions instead of on the Twitter homepage or in a 3rd party application. Although Twitter offers an RSS feed for your friends timeline, strangely it's a password-protected feed. Considering that you can freely find out who someone is following, and then reconstruct their friends timeline, this seems a little unnecessary.

Unfortunately, as a web-based RSS reader, Google Reader does not currently support password-protected feeds. Well, I for one don't mind if someone wants to see what all the people I'm subscribed to are saying, and realistically I can't imagine that they would. If you feel the same, have a look at Free My Feed.

Free My Feed will take any password-protected feed as input, and once given the correct credentials will spit out an unprotected feed on the other side that can be subscribed to with any RSS reader, including Google Reader. To use it to free your Twitter feed, do the following:

1. Enter http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss into the Feed URL field (this is the same URL for all Twitter users)
2. Give your Twitter credentials
3. Click Submit
4. Copy the URL at the bottom of the result page and paste it into Google Reader (it will look something like http://freemyfeed.com/feed/ with a huge string of random characters following it), or just click on one of the handy buttons to automatically subscribe in your feed reader of choice.

Free My Feed is also useful for subscribing to SSL-encrypted feeds that might happen to have an expired certificate, since Google Reader will refuse to subscribe to a secure feed with an expired certificate.

Tags: expired certificate, ExpiredCertificate, feed, free, Free Feed, FreeFeed, freemyfeed, freeware, friend timeline, FriendTimeline, google, reader, RSS, secure, social software, SocialSoftware, web