Twitter is a new way to communicate, and that’s what makes it cool. However, the development team makes it hard for non-techies to understand how to use the service, simply because most of the truly needed features are not directly built in the UI. I don’t like Twitter apps either because they’re all annoying (I’m looking at you, Thwirl), and they require a lot of attention. So unproductive from my standpoint. I have other fishes to fry (or other cats to whip as we say so elegantly in French).
Thankfully, Greasemonkey is here to save the day! Below is a screenshot of my dashboard on twitter.com. As you can see, there are a few additions that make everything much more interactive.
Have a look at this screenshot, and find all the related scripts below this pic.
The big square where I can easily shorten an url, upload a pick, or submit a video is built by Twixxer. It took me a while to start using it, but now I am totally addicted to its ease of use.
In the sidebar, the mentions are the tweets that contain your name, but not at the beginning of the tweet (and therefore not considered as a reply). Script here.
A little more below, I can also see the 10 most popular trends on Twitter. Most of the time, I don’t pay attention to those. Sometimes, a funny one (like #farted today) will catch my attention, and it’s mostly a way to be aware of the actual buzz. Script here.
Farther below in the sidebar are all the latest replies directed to the profile’s holder. Here, I am on my profile, so it’s not really useful. But when visiting other people’s profile, it helps to see how conversational they are on Twitter, and what kind of replies they get. The script is useful but half-reliable (it won’t show all replies, and will sometimes show tweets that are not replies). Script here.
On each profile pictures, you can see a cycling arrow. When this arrow shows, it means this user is following me. On Twitter, I like reciprocity. I regularly go on friendorfollow to get rid of those guys who wait for a follow-back to un-follow you. But it takes time to clean up your friends’ list, so this tool is kind of a shortcut. Script here.
There is one script that is sometimes useful but that doesn’t show here because it is often broken (Twitter doesn’t seem to like this script): the ‘retweet this’ button. The button sits right below the reply button, and it makes it easier for re-tweeting an item, compared to the traditional copying the text, hitting reply, pasting the text, and adding RT before the name of the original twitterer. Script here.
There are a whole lot more scripts for twitter.com out there, but those ones are the most useful to my opinion, and as of today, February 10th, they all work properly. If you have some cool ones too, please do share!