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.
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