Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Twitter quick-links in Google Chrome

21st March, 2010

Chrome, Google’s web browser, has a cool feature in it which allows you to add custom search engines. For example, you can create them for Google, Yahoo, your own blog or whatever.

But they are pretty generic in nature. This means you can quite easily add some extra cool features to Chrome without very much effort at all.

Here, I make a couple of cool Twitter extensions, that allow you to construct a tweet and find a user quickly.

First of all, let’s make a way to quickly find a user.

Right click on the Omnibar (the address bar) and select Edit Search Engines (you don’t have to be on Twitter.com).

Then, click Add, and enter the details as shown in the screenshot. Click OK to finish.

Now, you can type “@” then a Twitter username into the Omnibar, hit return, and go straight to their Twitter profile!

Next, let’s make a way to start a new tweet really quickly.

Bring up the settings as above, but this time input this data and hit OK to finish.

Now, you can type “twt”, then some text, hit return and it will take you to Twitter with that text already in the Tweet box!

Got any other cool uses for the Omnibar that I haven’t come up with? Leave a comment!