Chris Morrell

I’m trying to update the theme on this blog… right now it’s a little screwed up.  I’ll get to it in a bit.

Update: it was bugging me, so I went ahead and wrote the greasemonkey script.  It highlights replies in yellow, and the last message you read in green.  Here’s the Userscripts.org page.

I just recently started using Twitter, and so far I like it a lot more than I ever thought I would.  This is a problem, though, because I now use it enough to be very frustrated with its faults.  Obviously their scaling problems are an issue that many, many people have talked about, and there are a number of core changes that might make the service better (location-based tweets, additional tweet “types,” etc).  But I’m not talking about anything so grandiose—these are just two simple changes to the UI that would make me very happy.

1. Show Where I Left Off

Every time I refresh my twitter home page, I have to scroll down and find where I left off.  Wouldn’t it be nice if twitter remembered that for you and added a nice little separator in your timeline?  It’s a very simple interface tweak, but could save you a few seconds each time you check twitter.

2. Highlight Replies

Often, even after I’ve found the last tweet I’ve seen, I don’t have time to read through everything posted since then, so I skim.  Normally I’m looking for conversations that I’m either watching or a part of, or I’m looking for replies to my tweets.  Now conversations/threading is an issue that goes into the “bigger problem” category (an issue that Plurk has solved nicely, by the way), but showing replies should be easy as pie.  If a tweet has @inxilpro in it, just highlight it or use some icon to differentiate it.

Solution: Greasemonkey?

I realize that both of these UI changes could be solved with a little Greasemonkey script.  In fact, I plan on writing such a script when I have a spare moment (hah!).  I also realize that both these problems are solved by a number of Twitter clients out there, so maybe I’ll give Twitterific another chance.

A little while ago I came across onehundrespushups, which is a site that’s supposed to train you to do 100 push-ups in a row after 6 weeks.  I decided to give it a try, and proposed a group effort on twitter.  So far a few people have joined in:

1. Reed Gustow
2. Nate Gasser
3. Joe Cairns
4. Roz Duffy
5. Howie Ross
6. Maya Northen
   

Want to join us?  We start August 11th, and see where we all are after 6 weeks.