IE8 Accelerators for Twitter, BackTweets and What the Hashtag?!
Autor: Léo | Publicado: 2009-06-23T13:30:00-04:00

Today I stumbled upon this bit.ly Accelerator for IE8, which makes easier (and faster) to use of my favorite "shorten url" service (bit.ly).If you don't know what are Accelerators (available only on IE8), the idea is pretty simple and the video bellow explains it better than I would:So, after having a look on how easy is to create an accelerator, I decided to create a couple for some Twitter-related activities that I have to perform now and then, such as:Search tweets containing a specific termGet a hashtag definitionCheck who else tweeted about an articleSearch tweets containing a specific termOne of the hot words of the moment seems to be "real time search", with Twitter Search on the spotlight. But how do you usually search for something on Twitter? Let's say you are reading this article and want to find more about the term "real time search", for example, so you select this term, copy it, open a new tab, go to search.twitter.com, paste your text and click on "search". To do this is not really rocket science, but probably time-consuming if you must do it frequently.So, using this IE8 Accelerator you can just highlight a word/phrase and, when you click on the accelerator icon (or right-click the word/phrase) an option ("Search on Twitter") will appear for you to search for this term on Twitter. If you click on this option, another tab will open directly with the search results for this word/phrase, as shown below:To install the Twitter search accelerator, click here (select the option "Make this my default provider for this Accelerator category" if you want this option to be listed on the first menu that appears)Get a hashtag definitionSimilar to the Twitter Search above, with the difference that this Accelerator will use the highlighted term and search for its definition using What the Hashtag?!, an user-editable encyclopedia for Twitter hashtags (with more detailed information, related hashtags and statistics).Not all hashtags will have specific definitions/statistics listed there, on which case it's you will probably want to use the "Search on Twitter" Accelerator and just search directly for all tweets containing that term.Example of search for the hashtag #e2confTo install the What the Hashtag?! accelerator, click here (select the option "Make this my default provider for this Accelerator category" if you want this option to be listed on the first menu that appears)Check who else tweeted about an articleBackTweets is one of the most useful Twitter-related services that I have seen. It lets you do an URL search on Twitter, allowing you to get a list of tweets that contained a link to that URL (it even list those tweets that used a shortened version of the url - such as bit.ly mentioned earlier).Due to its nature (links), this Accelerator can be used in two ways:1) To check tweets linking the URL you are reading now: such as to find out who else found this article interesting, just right click in any part of the page and select the option "Search link with BackTweets", as shown below:2) To check tweets containing a link that you see at the page you are reading now: such as to find out who else tweeted this link, just right click on the link itself and select the option "Search link with BackTweets", as shown below:To install the BackTweets accelerator, click here (select the option "Make this my default provider for this Accelerator category" if you want this option to be listed on the first menu that appears)Well, those are my 3 IE8 Accelerators for now. If you can imagine any other useful Accelerators for other web services that you would like, just let me know and I will try to create one and post here as well.P.s.: If you are interested in building your own Accelerator(s), check out the Microsoft reference page on the topic and also this great article "How To Create a Custom IE8 Accelerator".