Previously I was using
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=xyz&count=5
For reading feed, you have to authenticate first using token and key in dev.twitter.com site.
Also, you can try TweetSharp library. https://github.com/danielcrenna/tweetsharp.
Update 19/10/2016:
The Github danielcrenna/TweetSharp is not available any more.
From https://github.com/shugonta/TweetSharp
this project is officially archived / dead....
If you need commercial and/or active support for a Twitter-based API wrapper, you may want to orient your organization towards alternatives like Twitterizer or LINQ to Twitter.
However Nuget package TweetSharp is still available (Last updated 2013-06-22)