How to View Protected Twitter Updates

Twitter may be a venue for sharing quick thoughts with the world, but some users prefer to keep their Twitter updates private, allowing those protected tweets to be viewed only be those people whom they have granted permission to follow them. If an individual user has protected his tweets, you cannot view the tweets on the person's twitter account or by using any other backdoor method. You can, however, view a user's protected tweets by going through the account of a follower.

Instructions

1. Go to Twitter in your web browser and enter the name of the user whose protected Twitter updates you would like to follow. Click on each icon of the user's follower list until you find a follower who does not have a private account. Note the name of the follower.

2. Type "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/[user].xml" into the address bar of the web browser. Take out the "[user]" and replace it with the name of the follower you noted. The XML data page for the non-protected username is displayed, including any protected tweets.

3. Press "Ctrl+F" to open the find feature on your computer. Type the username of the protected user whose tweets you would like to view. If the person has tweeted since the XML page has been updated, the find function finds the name in the XML page. The person's tweet is the text that follows the username.

4. Return to the private user's account if you didn't find any tweets from the person on the page of their first follower. Click on each follower again to find another unprotected follower. Use the "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/[user].xml" address to go to that follower's XML page.

5. Repeat the process until you run out of unprotected followers for the best results. Different followers XML pages yield different results and you may find protected updates on one followers account that are not showing up on another's.

Tips & Warnings

• While Twitter once had a security issue thanks to the indexing of user tweets by Google, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Google security issue has been corrected and protected Twitter updates are no longer visible in that manner.

References

• About Online Tips: How to Read Private Messages on Twitter
• Los Angeles Times: A Twitter Hole Lets You Google Protected Tweets