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A Better Twitter Interface

By Brandon Bowersox-Johnson on December 3, 2009

The Problem

Screenshot of a typical Twitter post with a short piece of text, such as 'This is earth-shattering', followed by a long meaningless link URL

I know and trust the author of this tweet.
But from the context and the ugly URL I cannot tell what it is.
Guess what...I don't bother clicking.

The Solution

Screenshot of an ideal Twitter presentation showing the same text, 'This is earth-shattering', followed by an icon and text showing it is a Washington Post article titled 'Asteroid Strikes Microsoft''

Now I can quickly scan many tweets and see meaningful information.
Details can be provided on mouse hover, such as the domain name the source content comes from, or the time it was posted or updated.
For pictures this can pull in thumbnails and provide the full-size on mouse hover.

The Technique

We call this "tweet link introspection". Twitter clients can implement this and instantly improve the presentation of the gadzillions of links being tweeted every day.

It can be turned into a jQuery add-on to allow any website to perform link introspection on their content. It can improve the presentation of blog posts, comments, RSS feeds and more. The new information can even be used for search results so I can find this post again by searching for 'Dan Asteroid'.

Comments

Has this been implemented?

By Anonymous on February 3, 2010

Has this been implemented? If I were to use a standalone Twitter app, I'd like to use something like this.

When you say it can be used for search results, do you mean search results from within the twitter app or, say, search engines? I would imagine Google and Bing would love to add such data to their indexes. That is, if they don't do tweet link introspection to some degree, already.

~Brian Kung

I don't see any way to log in to comment, so I'll just leave my URL.
www.CallMeKung.com

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