6 Cool Apps and Extensions to Improve Twitter on Your Desktop

Twitter has great mobile apps, but using Twitter web on a browser often leaves people complaining about several issues. These apps and extensions attempt to improve Twitter Web with features like a better sidebar, bookmark organization, and a minimalist alternative interface to the default Twitter.

1. Kizie (Web): Nice Feature-Rich Alternative App for Twitter Web

Kizie is a web app for using Twitter, bringing many cool features that the default app lacks. Just log in with your Twitter account and you’ll see a cleaner interface with fewer ads and some web browsing optimizations. Features include:

1. Reader view to read links in a clean and beautiful reader mode.
2. Image preview to see photos, videos, and GIFs in their entirety when you hover over them.
3. Upload any media to a tweet, be it videos, photos, or GIFs.
4. Analytics to see interactions on your tweets and profile and how many people click on the links you tweet.
5. Bookmark to save tweets for later.
6. Double-click a tweet to like it.
7. Automatically convert images to Twitter-compatible formats when you upload them.
8. Cancel or edit tweets within 10 seconds of posting.

Kizie gives you access to all of these options but limits the number of times you can use them in the free version. Try it, and if you like it, you might want to subscribe to Kizie Pro. Otherwise, the free version is still a great way to improve Twitter without subscribing to Twitter Blue.

Twemex is a browser extension that replaces the default sidebar on Twitter Web to make it a fun and more useful experience. You get four main features in this sidebar:

1. Random User Highlights: Twemex will choose a random user from the people you follow and display their most popular tweets (by likes and retweets) all time or recently. It’s a great way to rediscover who you follow.
2. That day : See the top tweets from previous years from the people you follow.
3. Recent Hits: The most popular tweets on your timeline from the past few days, just in case you missed something.
4. Our exchanges : Click on any user and you will see all past conversations between the two of you.
5. Powerful search: Twemex’s search feature has keyword operators to quickly search your tweets, timeline tweets, featured user tweets, user replies, and Twitter lists.

Twemex is a great addition for anyone who uses Twitter on the web, reducing time wasted on the social network. And by the way, just in case you want to avoid distractions, you can also disable Twemex to get a blank sidebar.

To download: Twemex for Chrome | Firefox (Free)

3. Dewey (Web, Chrome): Organize Twitter Bookmarks into Folders for Free

Technically, you can already bookmark tweets to save them for later. But Twitter’s implementation is messy and the search function isn’t up to snuff. And if you want to organize those tweets into folders, you’ll need to subscribe to Twitter Blue. If you already have a lot of bookmarks on Twitter and want to manage them, Dewey is a powerful and free way to do it.

Install the extension and click the Grab Bookmarks button to start importing your existing Twitter bookmarks into Dewey. It takes a few minutes, after which you can start organizing them into folders called Collections. You can also share these collections with other people and you can export them as a CSV file.

For your notes, you can add tags to bookmarks in Dewey and write comments to remind you why you saved a particular tweet for later.

A user’s Twitter feed is a chronological list of all the tweets they have ever sent. However, when it comes to active tweeters, it’s hard to quickly go back and check out their old tweets from a certain period. Social Scroll for Twitter solves this problem with a simple sidebar widget.

Open any user’s profile and you’ll see a year-by-year listing in the Social Scroll widget. Click on the year, choose a month and the extension will show you what the user was tweeting at that time.

To download: Social Scrolling for Twitter for Chrome (Free)

Do you end up wasting too much time on Twitter when you should be working or studying? Scroll Portal is a simple extension for mindfully browsing Twitter and reducing distractions and time wasters.

The extension displays a speedometer in the lower left corner of your Twitter screen, showing your scrolling speed and a number of miles showing how many tweets you’ve read. You can reset this mileage at any time.

And if you mindlessly scroll instead of reading tweets (which we’re all guilty of procrastinating), the speedometer will catch up with you. Set a limit in the speedometer where it imposes a 3 second penalty when you scroll too fast, so you know you need to concentrate and stop wasting time.

To download: Scrolling Portal for Chrome (Free)

6. PlainTweet (Web): Minimalist, distraction-free Twitter

Are you easily distracted on Twitter but still don’t want to cut it out of your life? Try PlainTweet, a web-based Twitter client designed to look minimal when using Twitter for targeted purposes.

PlainTweet removes all the bells and whistles from Twitter, including profile pictures, buttons for interactions, image and URL previews, and other similar distractions. In fact, you won’t even see retweets or replies from people you follow, you’ll only see original tweets.

It’s just about reading the latest tweets in chronological order, not the different ways social networks try to keep you hooked to their algorithms. You can choose a light or dark theme and even disable usernames to remove the bias it’s about.

Have you tried Tweetdeck?

If Twitter for the web frustrates you, maybe you should give it a try TweetDeck. This alternative client, also created by Twitter, has long been touted as the best Twitter web client for power users. With support for multiple columns, scheduled tweets, and many other useful features, Tweetdeck can change the way you use Twitter on a computer.

That said, you should know that Twitter recently announced plans to make TweetDeck look like Twitter, which didn’t go down well with many fans. Again, newcomers switching from Twitter to TweetDeck found a smooth transition, so check it out.

Read more

About the Author