Twitter – How to create an aggregated RSS Feed with all the people I am following on Twitter

I would say yes you do receive them all.

Certain replies unless you follow both users are not able to be seen.

Cases for replies and mentions :

1. Your account is protected mentions sent to people who aren't following you will not be seen.
2. You will only see replies in your home time line if you are following both the sender and recipient of the tweet
3. You will see mentions not replies in your timeline as long as you are following the sender

Even during the heaviest traffic times in World Cup I was able to see all the user tweets. The home timeline only receives 20 tweets without the refresh using the more button or the "N new tweets" message. That way it might seem to someone that they are not receiving all the tweets.

For example if X users > 20 posted at 2:30 pm during a World Cup game , it would appear to you that person Y's tweet is missing. It is there , it is just that the timeline only displays 20.

To verify this , you can test with the following tabs open on your browser.

• http://twitter.com/home
• http://snapbird.org/ (Search your friends' tweets and blank for the search term)
• http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.xml (Inspect in web developer mode using your firefox or chrome browser)

Looking at these three will tell you that you are in fact getting all your tweets.

Edit

If you inspect a user's timeline and are sure that it does not match up with the three above then I would suggest to check http://status.twitter.com/ to see the current status of any errors that are occurring site-wide.

If you think it is more localized you can submit a Twicket : http://help.twitter.com/requests/new

Think your Twicket is taking too long shoot a mention to @delbius the lead on Twitter's Trust and Safety team.

As you've noted, there are three categories that divide these up resulting in 8 different feeds:

15 vs 50 - This just tells you how many items appear in the RSS feed. Depending on how busy the group is and how often your RSS reader checks it, collecting only 15 messages could mean missing out on some if 20 had been posted. On the other hand, if the group gets very large postings a 50 item feed could overwhelm a basic RSS reader.

Messages vs Topics - Like you say, the difference between getting all messages or the first one of each thread.

RSS vs Atom - As a user there isn't really any difference between one or the other. Most of the differences only matter to someone programming the feed creation or reading process.