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Troys: One Twitter Script to Rule Them All

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Over the past year, all the major tech blogs have done round-up articles of fantastic Greasemonkey scripts to use with Twitter (including us). What this says about Twitter’s native functionality we aren’t sure, but we know we’ve had upwards of 10 separate scripts installed and committed at different era.

All that is vacant to end, at least for the next small while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It’s the innocently named, Troy’s Twitter Script (made by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.

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After installing the script and visiting Twitter, we found so many helpful tweaks to nearly every Twitter view that it was nearly overwhelming. Here’s what it does broken down into three main functionalities:

• Enhancement: Links in tweets are involuntarily prolonged and replaced with the target page title if available. Media like YouTube videos and Twitpic images are included in-line. Hashtags are converted to Twitter search links. Auto-pagination is enabled as you get to the bottom of the current page. The ‘definitions’ area is hidden. Last but not least, answers are included underneath the latest tweet, indented and smaller (fantastic for those of you still using the default "include all @answers" in your settings!)
• Functionality: Hovering over a tweet shows default actions like star (save), answer, and retweet. Long URLs are involuntarily shortened if the tweet you are typing in exceeds the length limit. Twitter names get autocomplete launched by typing an @ in a tweet. Twitter bio text gets inserted into following/followers list.
• New Hotness: A new search field added to Twitter sidebar. Any searches performed from sidebar get saved and added to the sidebar (removable). A tiny smilie face is added to the Twitter icon of those people who are following you. When viewing a specific Twitter user, their social graph is inserted in the bio area. Local time is added if the user’s time zone is in their profile. Map to user’s location is inserted if location or geo coordinates are in their profile. Finally, the most awesome addendum: Groups support in your followers/following tabs, you can add people to groups that show up in the Twitter sidebar.

Troy’s Twitter script, in our opinion, is crazy awesome. If you find yourself in a memory crunch and prefer not to use a standalone Twitter application, and use Firefox, this script is a must-have. In fact, it’s too terrible that Greasemonkey scripts really only work well in Firefox, because it sure would be fantastic to have all these features in every browser out here. To that end, you can try using Greasemetal (covered here) for Chrome, or GreaseKit for Safari on Mac OSX.

Update: Here’s a modified version of Troy’s script that adds a link in the user profile to the Mailana user analysis app, Top Twitter Friends. This feature must be rolled into the main script in the next version.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

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