Jon Fox » twitter

Twitter Throttle

jon — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:47:15 +0000

One of my biggest pet peeves on Twitter is when people I follow slam Twitter with a bunch of tweets in a short time. Maybe I’m the only one, but it’s definitely the #1 reason I stop following people. I don’t want a single user completely taking over my Twitter page…

With this in mind, I decided to write a GreaseMonkey script today to address the problem. I call it Twitter Throttle, and what it does is hides (and groups if they’re in a row) tweets when a user has more than one tweet on my screen at the same time. It will then also add however many older tweets are needed to have the correct total viewable on the page. So, for example, if there are 5 tweets that are hidden (because the user that made the tweet has already made a tweet that is currently being displayed) then it will pull in the 5 previous tweets that are by users not yet represented on your page. This effectively ensures that if there are 20 items on the page there will be at least 20 different users on the page as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in use:

Clicking on the links will display the tweets in case you still want to read them. I’ve posted the script here if anyone is interested. Be sure to set your twitter username and password in the script (used in the API call to add in older tweets to fill in for the hidden ones). Let me know if you have any feedback.

Ubiquity: Twitter Search

jon — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:48:15 +0000

I recently wrote another command for Ubiquity. This one allows you to do a Twitter search. Simply subscribe to the command here to add it to your command list.

Once youâ€™ve got the command installed you can perform a Twitter search by simply opening Ubiquity (CTRL+SPACE) and typing “twitter-search [search term(s)]“. Another simple one, but it saves me a little time and maybe someone else will find it useful.

Let me know what you think.

Power Twitter

jon — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:38:00 +0000

Been playing with Power Twitter recently and I love it! For those of you not already familiar with it, it’s a FireFox addon that builds on the Twitter.com UI to add a bunch of missing features (that Twitter should’ve already added).

Some of the features include:

Search right from your Twitter home page
Including all replies (including tweets that your @username is in the middle of the tweet instead of just at the beginning) on the replies tab
Expanding tinyurl style links to include the title of the page they link to
Embedding media directly in the Twitter interface instead of only through links (like twitpic)
Providing a mouseover on a user’s avatar to show their recent tweets (giving needed context sometimes)
And a few other nice odds and ends…

I included a few screenshots of some of these features above.

Overall this has proven to be a really great plugin from my usage so far. I find a lot of it is stuff that I didn’t realize how much I would use until I have it. I think it’s great that the Twitter community is active enough to modify the Twitter interface using FireFox addons, but it does raise a few questions about why the Twitter team isn’t integrating this stuff themselves.

In any case, if you use Twitter from the interface at Twitter.com much (and you browse in FireFox) I’d definitely recommend giving this addon a try.