ReadWriteWeb

Earlier this month, entrepreneur and blogger Jesse Stay noticed that both Facebook and Twitter had completely removed support for RSS from of their websites. After much outcry from the tech community, Facebook relented and re-added an RSS link to Facebook Pages once again. Twitter, however, did nothing.

But now, one developer has taken it upon himself to build a tool that uses Twitter's API (application programming interface) to create RSS feeds. The code, called "Twitter API 2 RSS," is now available on GitHub here.

Joe Hewitt, the creator of the Facebook iPhone app, Firebug, and former contributor to Mozilla's Firefox, announced earlier this month that he was leaving Facebook to go build "tools." What sorts of tools? Not just mobile tools, but "tools for writers, designers, programmers, whatever," he wrote on his personal blog.

Since then, many developers have been eagerly anticipating the tools Hewitt will create. Today, we get to see what one of those is: Scrollability, a script that brings native scrolling to mobile Web applications.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal posted an article entitled "'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web". While the article highlights some important issues surrounding the murky and potentially shady business of Web crawling, it fails to provide a comprehensive story on the uses of Web crawling. In other words, by focusing on one or two companies with spotty business practices, it casts the entire practice of data collection from the Web as something to be feared.

There is a fundamental problem that Internet startups face when they begin to grow: scalability. It is imperative to be able to not only handle large flows of data from usage, but also to deploy changes and upgrades to your software across multiple servers as fast as possible. Twitter faces this challenge every day as its farm of servers grows, and today the San Francisco-based company is open sourcing its solution to the deployment problem for all to use.

The folks at Snipt.org haven't been sitting still since we first told you about their code snippet-sharing utility in January. Today they released a number of tools to extend their service. First, they have a new API that allows for applications to be built that can talk to Snipt directly. This allowed for the creation of an Adobe AIR-based client application called Cloud Coder, Javascript embed code to integrate Snipt on a blog and finally, a WordPress plugin that all use the API.