I don't have a twitter account. But in certain cases, I follow people or events using the Twitter web site or RSS feeds. Because, luckily, Twitter provides usable RSS feeds, although I'm pretty sure they don't advocate or event document it.
Simply use a URL like this:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=USERNAME
But, seriously, you'd want to allow people to search for stuff, right? To become interested and later immersed in Twitter.
So evey time I want to look up a hash tag, I go to twitter.com and
duh – there is no search form. You can only sign in or sign up.
No search form.
Not even is there a link to a search form. How hard would that be?
My workaround is to go to twitter.com/a – the timeline of
certain @a, of whom I don't know who he is, but "a" is comfortable
letter to type – and there it is, at the top of the screen: a
search box.
Seriously? – Can it be that hard?
Update: Three people approached me with different ideas/URL of how to find the search form. The most mnmonically convenient seems to be search.twitter.com, though there is a javascript-free mobile version, too. Consequently, I added a form to my general-purpose search page. (Thanks for the hints to: Skudo, Julian and Chris.)