Power Twitter Not Quite Powerful Enough, Yet

There are a lot of things Twitter needs to do to make the interface more user friendly and until they do, many of us will be using third-party applications like TweetDeck or Twhirl. One of the most glaring drawbacks to posting or reading tweets directly from Twitter proper is the fact that the tweets don’t auto refresh. Another thing that would be nice would be for the search function to be available directly on our profile page.

Narendra Rocherolle from 83 Degrees decided to take matters into his own hands instead of waiting for Twitter and developed Power Twitter, a Firefox plugin that powers up your Twitter profile page by adding a search box directly in the sidebar, inline image and videos, the ability to see any tweets that contain your name instead of just the ones that start with @yourname, and a few more handy features. For those of you that use Twitter proper rather than one of the third-party apps, this is almost exciting news.

Why almost exciting? For one thing, and this is a big one, there is a time lag any time you switch from the main page to your @replies or DMs and come back again. Basically, anytime the page loads again you have to wait for Power Twitter to power up. It tells you it’s doing this with a popup status indicator that says, “Power loading”.

Another disappointment is that one of the features of Power Twitter isn’t even working at the moment due to an issue with the Twitter API. One of the handy things Power Twitter is supposed to do is to give you a snapshot of the latest tweets of any Twit when you mouse over their avatar or name. Unfortunately there is an issue with the Twitter API and you are presented with an error message on mouseover for now. Hopefully this is something they’ll be able to resolve because it’s a nice feature.

A few other features that Power Twitter adds are expanded urls and a Facebook tab in the sidebar so you can view the latest Facebook updates of anyone you’re following.

If it wasn’t for the time lag every time Power Twitter loads I’d say this was one very handy Firefox addon but for now I’ve got mine disabled and will stick to TweetDeck.