Twitter Add-ons for Opera

Tweet from Your Internet Browser with Widgets or Userscript

Oct 14, 2009 Maija Haavisto

There are many Twitter clients for various platforms. This article reviews two widgets and one userscript add-on you can use straight from the Opera browser.

Opera add-ons are not just for Firefox. There are several good ones for Opera as well. They can be used on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Twitter Opera Widget

Twitter Opera Widget is the most popular Twitter plugin for Opera. It has five tabs: Recent (the normal timeline), Mentions, Direct, Archive (your profile), Near (which shows tweets from your geographic area) and Search. Of course you can also post new tweets. Twitter Opera Widget can also be set to autorefresh and to be always on top of other windows.

Twitter Opera Widget can be downloaded from the Opera Widget site. When you press the Launch button, the widget is started and Opera presents a window asking whether you want to keep the widget. You can first try out the widget and then press yes or now. If you keep the widget, it will be accessible from the Widgets menu in Opera and can later be removed from Manage widgets.

Twippera

Twippera is another widget for Opera, which is installed the same way as Twitter Opera Widget. It has several settings, including auto-refresh and always on top. It is available in a variety of languages besides English, including Spanish, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Hungarian, German and Russian

Unfortunately Twippera is missing two important features: replying to tweets and direct messages (DMs).

Pbtweet

pbtweet ("pretty good, better tweeting") is an add-on that works on several different browsers. Its main features include threading of conversation (which is best illustrated in the screenshot in this article), automatical refreshing, automatical shortening of links (while writing), showing full URLs of shortened links and preview thumbnails of tweeted photo links.

pbtweet also adds some buttons to all tweets, with which you can easily retweet the tweet, DM its sender or translate it from another language to English. The translation detects the original language automatically and tends to work quite well, even though machine translation is never perfect.

At the time of writing there were some bugs in pbtweet. Sometimes all controls become non-responsive and one has to press Reload. Using URLs with question marks may result in non-working shortlinks Luckily the developers are working on fixing this.

pbtweet is not a widget, but uses a technology called userscript. It is essentially a custom JavaScript that the browser embeds on the Twitter web interface.

To enable userscript in Opera, go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced Content. Check that Enable JavaScript is checked and press the button JavaScript Options. Choose a folder in the field User JavaScript files and save the pbtweet userscript file to this folder.

Now when you go to Twitter.com you should be able to make use of the new features.

Opera Tip

• If you want Opera to refresh Twitter automatically but don't need the other tools, just right-click on the Twitter home page and and from the context menu select Reload every (the refresh interval you want).

See Also

Best Web Interfaces for Twitter

The copyright of the article Twitter Add-ons for Opera in Internet is owned by Maija Haavisto. Permission to republish Twitter Add-ons for Opera in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Twitter Opera Widget

pbtweet

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