140Char

If you use Firefox for web surfing and Twitter (I do!), then you might find Search Cloudlet is a useful plugin.

Search Cloudlet

It’s simple and effective to use – it inserts context-aware tag clouds in Google, Yahoo and Twitter pages.

Apparently the addition of Twitter was the suggestions of @cleverclogs, who suggested I give it a try. And having installed it, I now have a tag cloud on my Twitter home-page, plus search pages, profile pages, favorites and the public timeline.

You can click between the tag cloud for keywords, or, on Twitter, a tag cloud of @ replies, which is quite useful. And there’s a handy ‘Off’ option as well. You can also select to turn it off permanently on your own page, other profile pages, or on Twitter search.

To be honest, I don’t use it a lot – following 2000+ people means that I need more than a tag cloud for the latest page of updates to really look into the available data – but it can be quite handy for checking out who I’ve replied to recently, especially as a reminder if there’s a username I need to look up.

But it’s no hassle to have it turned to ‘Off’ for when I occasionally need it.

Have you used Search Cloudlet and found it useful?

And what Firefox Add-Ons would you recommend using with Twitter, or other microblogging platforms?

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed – perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

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