Twoosh Spotter: A Greasemonkey Script
EDIT (10/6/2009): Twoosh Spotter is now up to v2.0. I’ve fixed it so that the tweets shown after hitting the “more” button get checked for twooshes, and also fixed a bug where “&” was converted to “& a m p ;” and counted as 4 characters instead of 1.
I recently came across a new portmanteau on Twitter called a “twoosh” (TWitter swOOSH)!
Coined by rentzsch, A twoosh is a twitter that hits the 140 character limit exactly on the nose. This is just one of those fun little oddities that people like to play with, but unless the poster follows up their twoosh with another post pointing it out, the twoosh goes unnoticed by all but the equally twoosh endeared… and those with OCD.
To combat both OCD and unnecessary tweets by users calling out their own twooshes, I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that indicates twooshes called Twoosh Spotter!
Example of a spotted twoosh
Quite simply, Twoosh Spotter places a little swoosh icon next to any twoosh on any twitter page.
It will also display the character count for any twitter in a timeline if you:
- Right-click on the greasemonkey icon in your status bar and go to “Manage User Scripts”
- Select TwooshSpotter in the left pane and hit the “Edit” button. This should open it in notepad or your default text editor.
- Find the line that starts with “var show_count = false;” (line 33). and change the false to true.
Easy as 1,2,3! I debating turning this on by default but it may look a bit cluttered for some users so I went with the sleeker look.
So far this script seems to work great for me, but please do let me know if you find any bugs or strange behavior, or just want to make a suggestion. Also feel free to customize the script to your liking (but do leave mention of me in the source). If you don’t like my twoosh icon you can either make me a better one to distribute (please! I’m no graphic designer!) or just make yourself one and modify the script (replace that huge block of gibberish) to use your own.
To get twoosh spotter, go to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13873.
It’s new, so I’m sure to find issues and update it frequently. If you have any problems, go back to the userscripts page and check if there is a newer version. If not, leave me a comment there or direct-message me in twitter at my username “euicho”.
Now, for those of you who don’t know what greasemonkey is you should definitely get familiar with it, as it is one of the coolest ways to customize websites to your liking. Its a Firefox add-on, and once installed you can install little scripts that add functionality or modify the way a page looks.
If you just can’t be bothered to install greasemonkey you can always use the Twoosh Spotter Firefox Add-On (You’ll have to save it then drag it into firefox to install it), but I suggest using the greasemonkey script instead as it is more light-weight and easier to modify.
Happy twooshing!
