Version 1.0 of Power Twitter, an add-on for Firefox created by Narendra Rocherolle at 83 Degrees, was just released. If you use Twitter and were excited about services like Tweetree, this is something you’ll want to add immediately.
Power Twitter moves Twitter Search, inconveniently located on a different subdomain, right into the Twitter site itself. You can also just search a single user’s updates from that user’s Twitter page. Twitter should have long ago integrated a search box directly onto the logged-in Twitter home page. They haven’t, but Power Twitter fixes this.
Power Twitter also fixes the @replies feature, which currently only shows Twitter messages directed to you that begin with @[yourusername]. With Power Twitter you see all messages that contain your user name, fixing a big hole on Twitter.
YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic links are also added in-line to Twitter messages so you don’t have to click off site to see them. This is something competitor Friendfeed does and is an often-requested feature.
Another feature I like: you can mouse over a user icon and see the last few Twitter messages they’ve written. This helps to put current messages into context to understand the conversation.
Other features: you can click on the Facebook tab on the right and see updates for your Facebook friends directly in Twitter.
In summary, this is the way to fix Twitter, directly via the user interface, not from a third party site that users will forget to go to.
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that is damn cool, I was working on a project that did this same thing but this is a winner because it uses firefox.
nice work guys.
augmented twitter
narendra is the man.
Narendra is definitely the man.
Okay, enough of the sexiest talk.
It is really an awesome achievement, though. As some of my British born Indian friends say, quite pukka!
Very useful features but Biz recently indicated that all of these features would soon be on Twitter itself–so not sure how long this will be of use.
..when it comes to Twitter, ’soon’ is a relative term. why has it taken them so long to add a simple link to search..
Hey it works and am not holding breath on twitter - this could get a long term play - and integration with other social media could make it even longer
I couldn’t get any of the discussed features to work.
Each time I hovered over a user, I just got “Sorry, no recent updates.”
I was pleased to see that it automatically imports TwitPics. That’s a nice feature.
Too bad auto-refresh isn’t built-in.
the problem with auto refresh is that you might be entering a status update and you would lose it.
Very clever for distribution: they harmlessly hijack your tweets with “from Power Twitter” instead of “from web”
Granted most 3rd party apps do this, but this is the only one I’m aware of that does it through Twitter’s own interface.
Thanks for the post Mike. I will post more on the 83 Degrees blog soon.
@AppBeacon — right now the mouseover peek feature is returning “No updates” from Twitter. This may be related to work they are doing on a phishing scam or it may be an api thing. I will investigate.
@Timothy — I am gathering small features for the next update. Right now, the plan is to have photo posting, top twitter friends, and maybe a toggle for auto-refresh.
SWEET!!!
if your taking feature requests Narendra
can I get a DM notification and a reply notification and when hovering over the in reply to link a box showing the message
Cheers
Feature Requests : I just discovered TweetDeck which lets me see just the stuff since my last visit.
Any way that Power Twitter can do this?
This is really cool.
Finally a truly useful twitter hack. A lot of noise in this space, and then a true superstar comes along to show them all how it should be done.
I’m impressed!
Threaded conversations would be a killer feature.
Unfortunately, TechCrunch has killed Power Twitter - temporarily.
See this : http://twitter.com/AppBeacon/status/1094699639
I hope you are able to overcome this issue Narendra.
Looks like very useful.
Wow, this is AWESOME!! Finally, somebody has the wherewithall to create improvements to the twitter application. I am very pleased with the number of enhancements presented.
I especially like that “Power Twitter also fixes the @replies feature, which currently only shows Twitter messages directed to you that begin with @[yourusername]. With Power Twitter you see all messages that contain your user name, fixing a big hole on Twitter.” — woo hoo! about damn time! I keep having to use tweetbeep.com and tweetdeck to manage @replies.
Maybe now twitter will be much more “useful” !!
Great blog post Mike, as always, thanks!
Susan Beebe
This will remain a complete outlier until they get a good domain name like “Powttr.”
lol, it isn’t Web 2.0 until u leave the vowels out =)
Ahh… feeling much better now that I got my daily TC Twitter post
“In summary, this is the way to fix Twitter, directly via the user interface, not from a third party site that users will forget to go to.”
The same could be said for a lot of things, including search in general. At least that’s our philosophy. It’s not surprised that Mozilla has logged over 1 billion add-on downloads: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons.....downloads/.
Good tool
Also, Power Twitter is very cool. Nice job!
Hmm . . . sounds interesting - I installed it, restarted FireFox - but I don’t see it any where ??? Doh
@Chris Loft - LOL! I had the same problem too. I was looking all over the Tools menu item.
You actually don’t need to do anything like that. Just go to your Twitter page. After a few seconds, you’ll see that the Twitter logo is replaced with a “Power Twitter” logo.
Then, mouse over and Twitterer, you’ll see a window pop-up with their recent posts, etc.
You’ll also see the other features.
Ah der! Sort of transparent, isn’t it. Works really well, especially search. Wonder how long it will take to fix up the little problem with the API?
Sounds good, that we have the chance now to see all replies, even those who don’t start with @alias
…very cool indeed and bravo for the fine work. question is why w/$20M in funding is it taking the Twitter team so long to implement such basic features?
Uhm, potential but seems 1/8 baked right now. Too bad everyone is encouraged to “release early.” Silly trend and leads to poor usage levels compared to what it could see.
You’re assuming that the entire universe of possible users hears about it on day one, tries it out and then leave, never to return, because it’s 1/8 baked.
In reality, only a few people hear about it early on (even via TC) and try it out. Some of those people give feedback and help make the service better, well in advance of when most people will ever see it.
How many more “holes in twitter” need to be fixed by third-parties? What the hell is the twitter team doing anyway?
How does Twitter allow someone else to do them better than them…
If Twitter was like this natively with a few ads in pocket then they would be profiting how they need.
Twitter needs to buy this quick and embed.
1 guy just kicked the heck out of an entire company.
Narendra, my kind of developer, old school and late 90’s maverick!
It’s not hard for twitter to replicate this, what is hard is how to make this scale.
Ok, this is cool, but I don’t see the big deal.
Kudos to you, Narendra! I am already looking forward to the next version. I could definitely use the “photo posting” and “top twitter friends” features.
This could crush Friendfeed definitely… I can’t even think of next, better release… Great addon!
Thanks. This actually sparked an idea in a project I’m working on in a completely different thread of thought…
Will be interesting to see where this goes…
I’m still using their old version without the search and the problem is that it don’t display good picture from TwitPic (I see only half picture).
Anyway, I think this logo of “power twitter” is pretty odd. If you want users to use this and still feel they are in their Twitter, the power should go.
A while back I wrote about them in this post - If you use twitter at least do it with style: http://blog.go2web20.net/2008/.....-with.html
@Orli - I had the same problems with TwitPic, I hope this new build fixes it.
Speaking of new Twitter blah-blahs, has anyone else used BigAssTweet.com yet? I wonder if Twitter will get pissed that they are fighting against the 140 char limit. Can they ban selective people from using the Twitter API?
Anyway, could we get some more FriendFeed posts? I use them more now anyway.
Fwiw, there’s a number of greasemonkey scripts that do most of these things and a few more (though not the hover over avatars, that’s pretty sweet) but I guess make it all really tight and less frightening to install and there ya go.
I’ve installed Power Twitter but am not seing the features mentioned, like another user. Could anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? I’ve gone to Firefox add ons and searched for Power Twitter and then installed it, but no features. Hate being clueless. Any suggestions?
This is very useful tool but I experienced the following issues:
* got multiple “rate limit exceeded” errors. PT at least had a little error message saying they were working on it. That is nice.
* Facebook functionality didn’t show on my PT
* blocked folks started showing up
I would like to see:
* hover support on “Followers” just like on the home page
Looks like a really nice idea, but it makes my Twitter browser page very jittery (using Firefox 3.0.5 on Win XP). Twjittery? Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing this become a bit more robust, since Twitter could certainly use the interface improvements.
Installed on 3 machines and could not see PowerTwitter in the browser.
Then it hit me. Go http://twitter.com instead of https://twitter.com Bingo! Problem solved.
Going back to SSL and saying bye to Power Twitter
Love features like this that augment Twitter’s current features..
Anyone looking for a mobile advancement on m.twitter.com should point their mobile browser to http://dabr.co.uk
Built by @davidcarrington and pretty awesome..
Check it
Great features, but it’s too bad Twitter isn’t rolling stuff like this out themselves.
The Firefox plugin is a little buggy in my experience. For example, I posted the update “power twitter is interesting: http://bit.ly/LigF why hasn’t twitter launched some of these features? ex: 6 months & still no search box? odd” but Power Twitter truncated my post after the phrase “6 months”. I deleted the post and tried again with the same results. To get my post up correctly, I had to uninstall the plugin. Nevertheless, I like a bunch of these improvements… particularly the obvious ones like search and the @ replies fix.
Ha. I’m really sick of all the Twitter posts, but this is actually the best one I’ve seen. Good work Narendra, you is a peomp.
Nice plugin for those using the web version of Twitter, but most 3 party applications have these features built in, such as TweetDeck, plus many more features.
Isn’t there a great big Greasemonkey script that can do all this in one? I’m just funny about adding loads of Add-Ons to FF.
Still, the usefulness of this looks like I may have to make an exception.
Thanks. I will Twitter about this.
Great work by Narendra. MessageDance did this few months ago as well.
- The url expansion (for tinyurl, YouTube, Flickr and mp3 audio player).
- Inline reply to tweets
- Inline Retweet functionality
- Sharing (blog, tweet etc) Tweet conversations between two people.
e.g.
http://www.messagedance.com/user/mytweets/rshetty
Is it something else, or is the PowerTwitter plugin slowing down anyone else’s FF load time too?
I gave Power Twitter a try. And after a few hours of looking at the amount of image and text information added, I prefer regular Twitter. Simplicity has it’s rewards.
I couldn’t agree more
it’s way too ssssllllloooooowwwwww…. uninstalled within 5 minutes. Speed it up and I’ll use it
Appreciate all the comments. Just a couple quick items:
PT loads after twitter so it does not slow down the website. If you have 10 urls on a page it may take a while for them to unwind but that gets faster as more people use the service because of caching.
Simplicity is good! We plan to add settings so you can only use the features that you really want.
@Marshall — show me that script that displays Facebook status updates inside of twitter
I’m bummed that this only works with older versions of Firefox. I use the new Minefield/Shiretoko version.
You can always try entering a boolean value of “false” for extensions.checkCompatibility in about:config. Things are likely to go wrong, but the addon developer might appreciate the bug reports, just so long as you tell them you’re using minefield.
Hey Ma! Lookit me! I am on TechCrunch!
(look closely) oh yeah and power twitter is cool too.
Okay… Just updated to Power Twitter 1.01. Love the RT button!
This add-on very interesting, but multibyte character (I am usually using Japanese at twitter) is not correctly processed and couldn’t read.
It seems that if tweet made by twitterfeed and in page one, some kind of encoding error is occurring.
Version 1.01 is not correct this issue.
Hi, I need to use multiple twitter accounts, and tweetvisor is not even logging in, I tried Hootsuite, and it doesnt show number of followers for each account. I need also schedule my messages at different times for different twitter accounts at the same time.. anybody know a solution?
This is a great idea but I guess this would benefit more the celebrity fanatics to get tweets from their favorite artists but for those who are after free information and genuine interaction, who cares to pay just to get someone’s tweets? Some perhaps.