A solution to all your social networking anxieties
Well, not really, but you'd be surprised at how much I didn't get done while doing this (aided in part by the out-of-dateness of Dive into Greasemonkey and by general ignorance on my part).
It is well known that social networking thingummies are a good idea at most only insofar as no one's relationship every goes south. In the event that that does happen, though, and you want formally to dissociate yourself from the other party or parties, you're faced with two potential downsides: first, everyone else might know; second, the other parties will know, too, and if you could prevent the first effect you probably can't prevent the second. The second is of course even worse by being formal. Thus we have such phenomena as the facebook-wide announcement of a breakup, to which one simply mightn't know how to react. (I say "mightn't" because I of course don't participate in these things.) And to the parties themselves there must seem something particularly cold about having whatever has been going on in their lives reduced to "so and so has changed his or her relationship status". And Twitter is no exception in this regard, since, even though it has a comparatively impoverished ontology in which (as I understand it) one simply follows and has followers, but no more detail than that exists, nevertheless that one now is, or no longer is, following someone is no doubt knowable at least to that person if not to curious others.
So you might find yourself keeping someone on your list of followeds out of purely political motives, despite not caring a whit about what that person says. How might one best deal with this? Simple: deception! Using this simple Greasemonkey script you can—should it work—automagically delete certain updates from ever appearing before your eyes, without, nevertheless, having unfollowed anyone. And can cause them to reappear later, should you so desire it. It has been only moderately tested on locally-hosted files (don't ask how I obtained them; it's too terrible) since I don't have a twitter account. Though I did discover that someone using one of the other names I've used online in the past (you thought "ben wolfson" was my only pseudonym?) had an account and was following, and was followed by, several people I actually do know. Mysterious. Anyway, while I think it should work mostly, I won't be very surprised if it doesn't, since it hasn't exactly been subject to rigorous testing.
update: this seems more featureful.
Comments
on 2009-02-24 18:55:21.0, Ben Wolfson commented:
Obviously it won't work if you read your updates via rss (in which case I guess you can use Pipes) or the phone (in which case for all I know you're hosed).
and, further, on 2009-02-25 16:04:31.0, Shawn commented:
TweetDeck allows you to group your follows into different columns. If you don't want to unfollow someone, but don't want their updates showing up in your fiew, just don't add them to a special group. They'll remain in the All Updates column, but you just shunt that one off to the side and poof: no more updates from them. It does take a little work to set up a group that includes everyone you WANT to get updates from, excluding this one person, rather than yours which just masks a selected individual. But you also don't need a greasmonkey-compatible browser to do it.
and, further, on 2009-02-25 16:05:28.0, Shawn commented:
"fiew" = "view" and is not in fact some awesome techincal term applied to Twitter.