Filed under: Features, Web services, Microblogging, Twitter
Twitter is finally getting on board the bookmarklet bus, about a million years after every other Web service and URL shortener in the megaverse. You can now add a button to your browser's bookmarks bar that allows you to quickly shorten a URL using the little-hyped t.co shortener. Gee, I wish bit.ly would have thought of that ... oh, wait, they already did.
I'm perplexed by the little ways in which Twitter continues to thwart its very enthusiastic and supportive development community with official versions of everything third-party devs have been doing. On the plus side, the Tweet Button bookmarklet is the functional equivalent of the Tweet Button for sites that don't have a Tweet Button of their own. It's not that it's useless, it's just ... kind of a boring, old feature that's already been done to death.On the even-more-frivolous side, there's been a shakeup at the top of Twitter's most-followed rankings. Lady Gaga has eclipsed Britney Spears as the owner of the most-followed account in all of Twitterland. Justin Bieber, who already claims the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, is now the most-listed person on Twitter. I wonder how many of those lists include nobody but Justin ... his fans are insane!
Mashable has published a list of 7 Chrome extensions for Twitter, and some of them are pretty decent. Twitter Share This Page might be rendered redundant by the new bookmarklet, and Twitter Creation Date is boring (who cares how old someone's account is?), but Twitter Refresh is pretty sweet. It automatically reloads Twitter when new tweets pop up, so you don't have to click the "X More Tweets" notification. Snazzy!
Do you have any favorite Twitter-related browser extensions or userscripts? Leave links in the comments, and I'll round them all up!
The Twifficiency saga from last week has also reached an end, with Twitter temporarily taking down Twifficiency, and then reinstating it after the creator agreed to add an opt-in checkbox instead of automatically tweeting scores. Apparently, Twifficiency broke the cardinal rule of the Twitter API: "don't surprise users!" Obviously, the checkbox has killed any reason to be interested in Twifficiency, as its status has been reduced from "annoying virus" to "plain old useless app."
If you post photos on Twitter, be aware that a lot of phones and apps automatically geotag photos. A new site called I Can Stalk U shows a stream of tweets from users who have revealed their location using photos. Each tweet says "I am nearby ..." followed by an exact address or a Google Maps link. Creepy! And it's not like the site uses anything more than public information, either ... so, if you don't want your location broadcast to the world, just be aware of whether you're automatically adding location to the EXIF data on your photos.
It's been a bit of a slow news week for Twitter, so I'd love to have some more Twitter apps and add-ons to review. Drop me a line with your Twitter news and tools in the comments, and it might appear in next week's column. Later on, Twitter fans!Twitter Tuesday -- Twitter becomes the last Web service to get a bookmarklet originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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