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Show HN: Tilepad for Twitter – Twitter in Pinterest Layout

chrome.google.com

30 pointslaxk17 comments

This is my early alpha version of the Chrome Extension - Tilepad for Twitter.

What will be done more / What I'm working now:

* automatically change the number of columns depending on the width of the window * buggy markup tweets (sometimes) * settings: don't show promoted tweets, show images instead of links, block certain tweets in #discovery mode(no duplicates) * bugs!

I will be glad to hear any comments, suggestions, bugs, questions and so on.

Thanks.

From the About text: "Set of different things and pipyakas that increase hang time on Twitter." What does "pipyakas" mean?

Pepyaka is a meme from the Russian Internet, meaning "a thing." I've made a similar Chrome extension for a private Russian web community and the description partially migrated here. I’ll fix it.

What's fascinating to me is that this layout makes it much more difficult to understand the timeline as linear since you have to read across the page (left-to-right) and down with noted differences in the sizes of each tweet.

It's the effect of reading all tweets at once instead of focusing in a single tweet at a time. Clutter adds distractions which take away from the value of each individual tweet.

However, when I hit a batch of tweets that are primarily photos (as opposed to pure text and links), it's much easier to understand what's happening.

I hear your point, though I believe it's the matter of individual reading patterns. I don't miss important tweets, just the opposite, I find them quicker.

I like this, but (and there always is a but when it comes to Chrome addons), it is liable to break when Twitter does a redesign. I feel a redesign is imminent for Twitter, as it's a forever shifting design. Maybe I'm worrying too early, and can use this, but I would dread the day when the author forgets to update the code when Twitter does a redesign. Perhaps Twitter will do a redesign just like this and there will be no need for updated code.

There are a few options how I can handle it.

* Chrome web store support page. It is a default option. The user can complain there if something doesn't work.

* Implement a complain button in the extension and if something broke and X users clicked the button, I will take action. IMHO It would be nice to have a central maintenance point which the extension will check and in case If you turned on 'maintenance mode' then just show a dialog to users like: The extension isn’t working properly right now. It will automatically be disabled. What to do? [Disable], [Keep it running]

* automatic way: try to build a heuristic system which will monitor changes in the layout and notify to the developer of any issues.

In any case, there will always be a time when the extension would not work if Twitter changes something globally.

I'll be very happy if this functionality will be implemented on the Twitter side.

This is brilliant.

Almost like google+ actually.

I might start actually enjoying twitter because of you.

---

Twitter: painting itself into the spam distibution tool corner since its creation, yet getting away with calling it a feature (R)

If there was any doubt : I like google+ and I haven't liked twitter much (yet). Just so I can attract the right downvotes :-P

Nice job mate. Makes Twitter much more readable for me. You got some bugs with the rounded corners though.

Thanks, I’ll fix those.

Since every company will lock or limit their APIs once the product becomes really valuable. this is the way of the future for providing a custom experience, right?

So, twitter has a 100k API token limit, but would that really be a constraint for such a project?

It is a really interesting topic to discuss. It seems like we need to have a tool/framework on the browser side which allows advanced users to redesign the layout of a web-site. It is pretty clear right now that Twitter has different groups of users and it is clear to me that Twitter should have different designs for them. Even in that post we could see people who "consume" timeline in a different way :)

IMHO Twitter/Facebook/Google+ should have Rich API and a default client but the user should be able to select implementation from different companies. (Similar to a search engine in the browser)

I'm biased but that looks at lot like somewhere.com - and that's no bad thing :)

Loving this so far. Great job

Thanks.

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