How do I see Twitter as someone else sees it?

July 25, 2012 10:24 PM

How do I see Twitter as someone else sees it (i.e., see the tweets of only people that a specific user follows)? Seems like a nice way to get more information from a specific field or channel. Tried ctwittlike but it didn't work.
posted by circular to computers & internet (6 answers total)

I'm not sure there is a way to do it anymore. It actually used to be a feature on the Twitter site itself not all that long ago but they just kinda disappeared it(if you do that now you'll just get the list of the person's follows), similar to them silently removing RSS feeds.

To be honest, though, it was a pretty weird feature, and I'd guess most people just didn't care about it, if they were even aware of it. (Where "most people" is the 77% percent that Twitter has shown increasing tendency to cater to at the expense of those who'd want some of these more fringe offerings.)
posted by Su at 12:03 AM on July 26, 2012

Tweetdeck does this (I just tested in the web version): Add a column, select "Timeline", enter the user name that you want to see.
posted by Skybly at 5:56 AM on July 26, 2012

Second Tweetdeck. It can run as a stand-alone app or inside Chrome (go to the Chrome Store-- it's free). Naturally you won't see DM to that user, but that's it.
By the way, I think their Timeline excludes their own posts (unless one of their followers re-tweets them), so maybe a second column to follow their posts, as well.
posted by Sunburnt at 7:38 AM on July 26, 2012

For a while, I used Yahoo! Pipes to publicize my view of Twitter so I could share it with others via a sidebar widget on my WordPress blog. I could only do that for my own feed since it required my Twitter username and password in the Pipe. At some point, a change in the Twitter API broke that and I haven't taken the time to look into whether it's fixable.

Not exactly what you're asking about but I thought it might be relevant.
posted by JaredSeth at 8:57 AM on July 26, 2012

If you wanted to take a look at how I was doing it then, here's the generic version of my Pipe:

Publicize Twitter Timeline
posted by JaredSeth at 8:59 AM on July 26, 2012

Huh. I hadn't noticed that in NewTweetDeck. (I'm still an AIR-version holdout.) Considering how much they'd gutted it in the transition, it's surprising to see something new in it.
posted by Su at 10:32 AM on July 27, 2012