You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

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Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

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Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

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Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

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Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

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(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

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Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

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Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

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Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

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User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

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Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

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Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

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Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

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That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Proof That God Does Exist – You Can Finally Block Those Insanely Annoying Facebook Quizzes For Good
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)

• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Benchmarking Tools (Wednesday 4:25PM)
• Monitor All Your Domains From One Location
• Navicat For MySQL Bugs Filed
• MySQL Conference 2008
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Optimizing MySQL For High Volume Data Logging Applications (Thursday 2:50PM)

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL – the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster – parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database – definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) – should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features – an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications – more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment – I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL – tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System – sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design – I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL – sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) – more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) – even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database – by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle – probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks – more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures – man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime – by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP – by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?

• My MySQL Conference Schedule
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Portable Scale-out Benchmarks For MySQL (Wednesday 10:50AM)
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Monitoring Tools (Wednesday 5:15PM)
• Must-Know People In The MySQL Field
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: The Future Of MySQL (Tuesday 11:55AM)