No Twitter Trending Bots - Greasemonkey Script

First, the good stuff.  You can read the backstory down below.

Script:

http://jazzychad.com/twitter/notrendingbots.user.js

If you are using Greasemonkey in FireFox, you can click the above link to install the script.

What does it do?

This Greasemonkey script will remove tweets by the Twitter Trending Bots from the http://search.twitter.com/ search results. Right now that list includes:

If you are searching a trending topic, you don’t need a dozen bots telling you it’s trending. You already know that!

However, if you are specifically searching for one of these bots, the results will remain intact, just in case you want to use one of them to see the history of trends.

If any tweets are removed from the results, a little blue info window on the results page will tell you how many.

Screenshots:

No Trend Bots - screenshot 1


No Trend Bots - screenshot 2


For people who know how to edit user/greasemonkey scripts, there is a sections that looks like this:

trendbots.push(”tweet_trends”);
trendbots.push(”realtimetrends”);
trendbots.push(”twopular”);
trendbots.push(”twopularfeed”);
trendbots.push(”twopularalert”);
trendbots.push(”twithority”);
trendbots.push(”attrending”);
trendbots.push(”trending”);
trendbots.push(”tweetingtrends”);
trendbots.push(”retweettrends”);
trendbots.push(”daymix”);
trendbots.push(”trendingtopics”);

Feel free to add/delete other bots/accounts from that list to suit your taste.

Backstory:

Earlier this week, I launched a new twitter bot @RealTimeTrends which tweets when new trends appear and when currently existing trends move up in ranking.  I found this to be more informative than the other existing trend bots.  Also, I use it as a way to link to my TweetGrid Search site.  Now, I have always felt that these sorts of bots were kind of spammy, but when I launched mine, I quickly found that lots of people click the links attached to those tweets… a suprising number, in fact.  So, obviously people find this sort of information useful.  My bot even has around 100 followers so far (in under a week, as of time of writing). Update: After 1 month it has 765 followers. *boggle*.  I try not to let my bot be too verbose.  It only tweets new and rising trends, not the entire list of trending topics every 5 minutes (which is how often twitter updates its trends list) like many of the other trend bots.

Suddenly I received a tweet to my bot from @gregorylent assailing its service:

@RealTimeTrends really sorry to see your service, you just add fog to twitter search ..

Link to original tweet

Apparently he was going after the other bots, too:

@twopularFeed what is your reason for being, i go to a topic to read about the topic, not to read your summary .. please get a job

Link to original tweet

I can’t say that I blame him, but like I said, it drives traffic so I’m certainly not going to turn it off.

So why write this greasemonkey script? Two reasons, really.

1. It occurred to me that the problem of removing trending bot tweets from search results could be easily achieved with a quick greasemonkey script.  I had never written one before, so I took the opportunity to learn how.  It was quite fun, so I think I’ll be writing some more in the future.

2. Even though my bot works, has followers, and even gets retweeted (another surprise), I still felt it was all kind of spammy.  I felt like writing this sort of script would even things out.  I am providing a bot to be informative, but I am also providing a mechanism to shut it up (along with others).

There you have it.  As more bots come along I will try to keep the script updated.

February 1, 2009 | Filed Under greasemonkey, tweetgrid, twitter, web

 
Popularity: 83%

Comments

One Response to “No Twitter Trending Bots - Greasemonkey Script”

  1. Martin Dudek on February 2nd, 2009 4:15 am

    Hi,

    I am the being behind the twopular fog. As long as me bots are followed and retweeted there seem to all reasons to keep them going. Otherwise your script is of course most welcome, don’t want to get on people nerves of course. Just started my bots yesterday so I will see what comes …

    cheers

    martin

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