Over the past couple of weeks I've come back to Twitter. One benefit/curse of that is that Steve Gillmor has my attention once again. Getting me thinking about new things is the benefit, having to translate from Steve-speak into something I can really grasp is the curse.

Freeing the @reply

Lately, he's been ignoring the @reply functionality in search of something better. Why? Well I'm still trying to fully wrap my head around it, but one of the main points is that the reach of the @reply is dependent on each user's Twitter settings. An @reply doesn't guarantee delivery to the recipient.

For example, if I want to direct a Twitter update at Steve Gillmor, I could use "@stevegillmor - blah blah", but if Steve has chosen to only see @replies from people he follows, which is a valid choice in anyone's Twitter settings, he'll never see my message.

So Steve's looking for a better method. Right now, the solution is to drop the @ symbol and find a better way to monitor for those tweets with his name in them using the 'track' functionality. You can track any terms you want and you get all the twitter updates containing that (or those) terms.

GTalk + Twitter

In addition to all this @ symbol ducking and diving, Steve's also a proponent of using Google Talk (or GChat) for playing in the Twitter stream. I've been trying this out myself lately and I can kind of see why he likes it, and also what shortcomings it has. It behaves like any other IM client, and doesn't really poll periodically for updates like most of the desktop clients do. It's also nice because it's inside the browser and not installed on the desktop which I like. I don't want to have to worry about using a Linux compatible client at home vs. a Windows client at work.

One of the problems with using GTalk is that the @reply functionality (or anything like it) disappears. You get normal web link functionality, but the @ symbol is meaningless in GTalk unlike most other Twitter specific clients. A secondary problem is that there is no running count for the 140 character limit. Steve says he just 'prays' he's staying inside of 140. I'm not sure if there is an easier fix for this.

Improving the GTalk experience

So how could the GTalk experience be improved? One way might be to add some Twitter specific functionality to the right-click menu inside of GTalk. By double-clicking on a users name you get the name selected (minus the @symbol if it's there) but what do you do with it? It would be nice to have a menu entry for getting the last few tweets from that user, or something similarly useful.

Presently, in Firefox3 Beta3 you can right-click and select a Google search on the highlighted username which pops up in a separate tab in the GChat window. And if you're lucky, those search results might yield a twitter page. More often than not, however you won't be that lucky.

The SmartSearch Extension

With a bit of searching however I found the SmartSearch Firefox extension which has versions for FF2, FF3beta3, and FF3beta4. This little gem adds a context menu item allowing you to search for the highlighted term using any of the Smart Keyword searches you've added to Firefox.

Smart Keyword searches are a godsend to begin with. You can create one just by right clicking on almost any search box. I've got Smart Keyword searches set up for Google (gg), Google Image Search (gis), Wikipedia (wkp), and IMDB (imd) to name a few. So I can just type "gg lasagna recipes" into the address bar and up come my search results.

So all I did was head over to my Twitter page and create a Smart Keyword search for the Twitter search box (right side of page halfway down). Now when I'm in the Gtalk window I can double click on a username, right click and select Twitter from the search choices and up pops a separate tab with that Twitter user, their profile info and their last tweet. Useful!

Of course undoubtedly someone who knows something about creating FF extensions (ie. not me) could create something a click or two shorter, and a lot more useful. This is merely duct-tape when we really need bondo.

Now if someone could just embed a character counter in my GChat window I'd be all set.

[Update: Turns out you don't even need to double click the username, the SmartSearch plugin will just take whatever word is under the cursor when you right-click. Nice!]