Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I have a really awesome username: @justin. Having your first name as your username on a really popular is some sort of nerd nirvana. People ask me my Twitter name, I just tell them my first name. No weird nicknames or names with a number sequence afterwards. Just Justin.
For my first few years on Twitter, it was great. For the past year, however, I’ve been cursed by the popularity of this generation’s Leif Garrett. My mentions tab is nearly unusable as I am inundated with hundreds of messages to “@justin bieber.” Some of them are funny. Most of them are just annoying.
I’ve long wanted a Twitter client that allowed me to filter tweets. Twitterrific and Tweetie on the Mac both have rudimentary support for such a thing, but neither of their iPhone clients offer it. Plus I prefer to use the Twitter.com Web site on my desktop rather than leaving up a distraction all day long.
Fed up after the latest confessional this morning by a Brazilian pre-teen who tweeted the same message 36 times, I cracked my knuckles and read up on building Safari extensions. A few hours later, the fruits of that labor are here: FilterTwitter. FilterTwitter is a basic injection script that allows you to establish words that you want filtered from your tweet stream. I’m using it to hide any mention of “Bieber”, “Beiber” or “Biber.”
Other uses:
- Filter any mention of politics
- Filter tweets with links to http://4sq.com or http://gowal.la
- Don’t care about SXSW or WWDC? Hide any tweet mentioning it.
FilterTwitter is free and probably has bugs in it. If you like it, stroke my ego and let me know.