For some time now, I’ve been using Twitter on a daily basis. I’m far from being a hardcore twitterer (or whatever the term is), but I do spend a couple minutes every day reading new stuff that appears on my feed.
When I browse tweets on my desktop machine, I usually don’t use any apps — I just visit the Twitter website and don’t need anything more fancy than that. However, the list of people that I follow has grown over time, and I recently started missing one useful feature that the Twitter website used to have — easy access to lists. I have created a few private lists and put most of the followed people on them, and being able to quickly open a list to read just the tweets of people on that list was really convenient.
Back in the old days (that is, like a year ago), Twitter used to display lists in the sidebar, next to the timeline. But, then they were removed, and instead buried several clicks away in the interface. Probably because the vast majority of Twitter audience simply wasn’t using lists, Twitter had no interest in making that feature easily accessible. (Some people were speculating that lists will be completely removed at some point — but I hope that won’t happen.)
Luckily, user scripts have been invented to deal with situations like this. I found one existing script that kind of did what I wanted, but since it only supported public lists (mine are private), it didn’t meet my needs — so I ended up quickly putting together my own version. Welcome back, sidebar lists:
If you’d like to use the script, grab it from Userscripts.org or from GitHub. Tested to work in Firefox and Chrome.