We’ve all been there. Do you have a friend that tweets once or twice a week, but as the playoffs gets closer, he gets a little bit talky? Maybe he gets into a flame war that doesn’t concern you (“I hate {C, PHP, Java}”); or, of course, you recorded last night’s season finale of your favorite show, and your friend can’t wait to make you nervous by stating that precise spoiler (I did that once. It feels so good when you hit the spot!).

Although I searched over and over again, I didn’t find any easy way to mute someone on Twitter, or at least find a tool that did just that the way I wanted. I normally use TweetDeck, and it’s the coolest kid on the block, but sometimes we just want to browse and read the latest news on our timeline. And as a developer, if there’s a piece of code that you really want to use, but hasn’t been written yet, you must write it. That’s what I did in the form of a Chrome Extension. Oh, and I gave it the suggestive name of TweetMute.

The usage is very simple. You open the options page, and type whatever Twitter usernames you want to mute. If you want to include their retweets too, you can. And if the time to unmute your peer has come, you can do that by just clicking on their username on the list. That’s it.

How it works? Every 1 second, it goes through your timeline and checks if there are new tweets. If there are, it verifies which of those tweets are from the annoying users you are muting, and removes them. This automatically exposes the worst case scenario: you might have to wait 1 second before the unwanted tweets disappear. Not to mention that if you mute 20, 30 users you can end up with an empty timeline. But the overall UX should be the same. It’s much better now.

I hope you’ll find it useful too. You can get the extension here.

Developer Notes:

1. Hashbangs suck.
2. You can get it or fork it from GitHub too.

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