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:
- Hashbangs suck.
- You can get it or fork it from GitHub too.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Couldn’t you just have a list of people you want to hear from, not include those you don’t, and just watch that list?
Absolutely, but the extension saves you trouble of doing that.
Another solution : Echofon provides ignoring params based on user, hashtag or apps.
Looking forward to trying this out, only recently got into twitter and noticed that a few people I follow tweet things I care not know about. Would be cool if you come up with keyword filters. Thanks
The problem is here : “And if the time to unmute your peer has come”
How can I know? I need to unmute in order to know if I want to mute.
I think it can be better to mute a person for an hour or another period of time. If the persron is still annoying, mute again for another period.
Dave Winer have suggested this feature a long time ago.
Agreed, but the fact that you’d have to mute her over and over is more work than to just go to her profile and check if they’re “good to watch” again, since the tweets are only removed from your timeline.
Never used this, but Hibari 1.1.3 for Mac has this in preferences. Supposedly much more powerful in the beta for the next version but I haven’t tried that yet.
Slipstream (http://slipstre.am/), Proxlet (http://proxlet.com/), and Refynr (http://refynr.com/) all do this. Curious, what did you search for when you couldn’t find them?
If you take a closer look, I didn’t find appealing results. I found Proxlet and Refynr, and they both have a lot of features/bloat (i.e., I don’t want integration with facebook to be part of the app), so I made something much simpler.
For clarification, Refynr.com allows you to filter/mute Facebook as an _option_. It is not required to use features such as FB integration, inclusion filters, or Klout details on Twitter user profiles.
Raphael – your Chrome extension looks pretty cool. I’ll check it out!
Nice! It works fine!
Add the extension on Chrome Web Store to be easier to find.
Congrats.
Will do!
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