stanlemon.net

Twitterpate Nuances

Some people have noticed that twitterpate has a little more to it then just threading, so I thought I'd post to detail what I've tried to do with this initial release of twitterpate...

• Moving on up the conversation: When a new reply comes up in a conversation you'll notice that the entire conversation is shifted to the top of your timeline.  This is because in the world of twitterpate the whole conversation is new - something has changed.
• Auto-updating tweets: Leave the window open with twitterpate for a little while and you may see some new tweets appear at the top.  Every 75 seconds twitterpate runs off and checks to see if any new tweets have arrived and if they have it automatically inserts into your timeline, moving conversations up and doing what twitterpate does best... thread!
• New unread tweets: When the auto-updater fires off and finds new tweets you'll know what they are because they're marked differently.  Right now this just works for tweets in real time, but I hope to add support to older tweets via cookies and some other cool stuff.
• Expanding links: Link rot is a huge concern for the twitter ecosystem, and personally I find looking at those itty-bitty shortened urls annoying.  Plus, they're a security concern and a phisher's best friend!  So twitterpate automatically tries to expand url's in tweets out of their shortened form.
• Link hash tags: Everybody uses them, so why not turn them into links automatically?
• Group by day: Tweets are grouped by day to give you more of a "timeline" feels to your timeline.  This also offers a way of collapsing and hiding yesterday's tweets so you can keep current with your twitter ecosystem.

Since I'm on a roll talking about twitterpate let me tell you about some of the things I'd like to do too...

• Offer psuedo-group support/filtering: You know, like you've seen in TweetDeck and other desktop clients, but in a clean web interface.
• Marking read/unread memory: Right now new tweets from the auto-updater are distinguished from the tweets present when you load, but as I mentioned above...  I want to keep your read-tweets marked in a cookie to transcend visits.
• And...  You fill in the blanks!  I want to stick with twitter's simplicity, but I'm also curious what power-user type features can b added to twitterpate to make it even handier to use.  If you have ideas, let me know!