Social Media Tips - Twitter.com Web Client Enhancements with Greasemonkey Scripts

Twitter Website an Abomination

An axiom of Social Media is Twitter is not going away anytime soon. The corollary is that the Twitter.com website is not improving much anytime soon. Even the latest retweet feature was clearly implemented by aliens who have never actually retweeted, since the messages do not append whom it is being retweeted or the ability to change the message (e.g., truncate when exceeding 140 characters by adding the retweeted tweeter).

Alternate Twitter Web Clients

Yes, I am sure your mobile or laptop client works great, but that is not what we are talking about here. We need clients for the web. There are a few clients and tools worth mentioning. Actually only one:

• TwitIQ is great for a number of reasons, the primary one is being able to switch between twitter accounts with a drop-down list, as well as a nice retweet button that works correctly (i.e., copies RT @user + retweeted text into the text box and lets you edit).

However, there are still some features not present, such as one-click unsubscribe from the messages view, as well as the ability to view the homepage of the user on Twitter, as well as edit the profile of the logged in Twitter user.

Enhancements to Twitter.com Web Client

What we need at various times are enhancements to the web client itself. The best approach, or at least the least tedious and most flexible approach is to use the tried and true combination

• Firefox - This needs to be mentioned as not 100% of visitors to our site use Firefox
• Greasemonkey - Wikipedia article
• Userscripts.org greasemonkey script repository

Ah Greasemonkey, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

There are various, myriad, dozens(?) of scripts available. For a while we were trying out the @troynt script but it does too much and slows down the browser enough to notice. We continue with the best-of-breed approach (vs. all-in-one) and use several scripts.

Userscripts for Twitter.com Enhancement

To keep things simple, we really only need a few enhancements: retweeting and unfollowing. That's it.

• Twitter Unfollow Buttons
• Twitter Enhancements - Retweet This
• Twitter Remove Non-followers - This script is useful but bit tedious (20 users at a time). For speedier results, try the TwitIn web application.

Behold, after the first two scripts are running, insta-better!

Another Twitter Unfollow Webapp

Just have to mention another Twitter Unfollow Web App, and that is UnTweeps. Works great, as it quickly detects Twitter users who have not tweeted in 30 days (stale Tweeters), and allows for rapid unfollow. Too bad after three logins they block you for a month if you don't pay them. That's pretty stale. Haven't they heard of the advertising business model? Or fremium? Don't take away free, bro.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Tips - Managing Facebook Pages
2. Social Media Messaging Synchronization
3. Social Media for Lead Generation