• Restoring Twitter 140: truncating 280 characters with browser addons

Twitter seems to be fiddling about while Rome burns. Its latest daftness is to double everyone’s character limit, from 140 to 280. Of course plenty of tweets are still nowhere near the new character limit but too many of those that are can make scrolling on a phone a bit disheartening. To be honest I thought the rot set in when Twitter made images automatically appear (rather than clicking to view) 😉 I’m sure we’ll all get used to this and in a few months Twitter will give us something new to bleat about.

Example of truncated tweet. There's another addon called Tweet Truncator (haven't tried it) https://t.co/Kwm2QcI8pb pic.twitter.com/J7ogZMqGg0

— Jo Brodie #WouldPreferThatYouBanNazis (@JoBrodie) November 12, 2017

If you’re on Firefox there are at least two addons that have been created in the last couple of days. I tried out the one called proper length tweets and it’s working fine for me. There’s also one called Tweet Truncator which I’ve not tried.

You can also use Dabr which is a simplified browser-based version of Twitter which won’t let you write more than 140 and truncates longer tweets. No addons needed, just authorise it to interact with your Twitter account and away you go.

Chrome has the 140 addon available which not only shows just a part of longer tweets but also prevents you from writing tweets that are longer than 140. I found out about it thanks to this article.

Someone’s done something for Tweetdeck (with extensions for Chrome, Opera and Firefox browsers) that involves github so it’s likely beyond me but see what you think.

Mute 140+ charac tweets in #TweetDeck:
– Get BTD https://t.co/Seb05iYzLD
– Enable regex filtering
– add `^[^]{141,}$` as a filter
– 💥 pic.twitter.com/rm9Mbiezl2

— Better Tweet‍Deck (@BetterTDeck) September 27, 2017

Similarly Tweetbot apparently lets you play with regular expressions to prune out any tweet that’s longer than 140 – though I think this would actually remove it from your timeline, rather than showing a truncated version which I’d prefer.

@gruber Tweetbots lets you keep it 140 with an admittedly simplistic regex: pic.twitter.com/dZ7Y4NazEZ

— 🎄🎅Xmas Jemaleddin🎅🎄 (@jemaleddin) November 9, 2017

• “This tweet is unavailable” – it can mean 3 different things

This post is unavailable 😉

Nothing sinister, just that when I wrote it in 2016 it accurately reflected what was going on. In 2019 Twitter’s changed things again and this post doesn’t yet reflect the changes. So I’m taking another look and will restore this post once done.

The sign often looks like this but there are a number of variations.

It can appear if you’ve blocked someone, or if they’ve blocked you, or if you’ve muted them, or if they’ve deleted the tweet, or if the account-holder’s tweets are not being displayed by Twitter for some reason. Locked accounts I’m not sure about yet, I plan to investigate and report back.

Original post is below as a .docx
How to do Techy Stuff – This tweet is not available

 

 

• Downloading your old Twitter faves, setting up IFTTT to capture new ones

Table of Contents

1. Capturing old favourites
2. Capturing new favourites ‘going forwards’
3. Useful background info

1. Capturing old favourites
To download your already-liked favourites do the following

1. Log into Twitter
2. Go to tweetbook.in and authorise it to access your account
3. Select a time range, choose Favorites and create your PDF e-book of your favourited tweets

If you have as many favourites as I have (3,502 over 7 years, oops) you probably won’t be able to get them all in one go (2012 alone yielded a 134 page PDF!) but you have the option of trying to grab them all at once.

Fig 1. Authorise Tweetbook.in with Twitter

Fig 2. Pick a date range… or leave blank to pick all (it may fail if you have lots)

Fig 3. Once your tweetbook is ready the green ‘Download’ button will appear

The output
Each page of the PDF has only a handful of tweets on it (it’s not very efficient) but the timestamp is hyperlinked so you can search for a tweet (Ctrl+F or Command+F to search within any document) and then find the original on Twitter.

Caution: I don’t know if it will display only public tweets that you’ve followed or, because you’ve logged in, if it can pick up any tweets from locked (private) accounts that you follow. Be aware that if you publishly share the contents you might be sharing tweets that people want kept private.

2. Capturing new favourites ‘going forwards’
You can use an IFTTT recipe so that every time you click favourite / like on a tweet it will be saved in some way of your choosing – for example you might use a Google spreadsheet to capture the tweet, or email it to yourself.

To do this… do this

1. Log in to Twitter and Google Drive / Gmail*
2. Visit IFTTT and create an account.
3. This is an example of a recipe you can use:
   Twitter Likes (Favorites) to Google Spreadsheet (other recipe options available*)
4. You’ll be taken through the steps of connecting your Google Drive as one ‘channel’ and your Twitter  account as another channel – this allows your Twitter account to save your favourites to a Google Drive spreadsheet directly (you don’t need to set that up, it happens automatically).
5. Favourite a tweet then go and visit your Google Drive and you’ll find a new spreadsheet created with your favourite in. After 1,000 tweets the system will create a fresh spreadsheet (same name with ‘1’ appended, and so on).

*or Evernote, or some other capturing system, examples here and here

3. Useful background info
Favouriting a tweet does not trap it permanently – if the original is deleted then you do not have a copy of it so ‘post-favouriting-processing’ would be necessary to capture it.

Other ways to capture a tweet include

• taking a screenshot (it can be helpful to include its address / URL)
• embedding it in a blog or Storify (in both cases subsequent deletion of the original won’t matter as your copy will remain)
• use Freezepage to capture a copy of the ‘page’ on which the tweet appears (you need to use the tweet’s own address – you can find this in its timestamp – and remove the S from the httpS bit of the address

I’ve written a short post on ‘forensic’ use of Twitter (where you’re collecting someone’s tweets for legal reasons) but note that I’m not a lawyer so bear that in mind.

Further reading
Capturing web pages (remember a tweet IS a web page as it has its own address!) – Nightingale Collaboration