For some reason the folks at twitter.com removed the hyperlinks on @names from the message stream (Update 1:30am PST: It’s a bug, says one of the developers that they are working on fixing). These hyperlinks were useful because they led directly to the profile of the person being spoken to/about.

Those who use third party Twitter clients might not have noticed, but I’ve seen several friends mention missing this feature and wondering when or if it would be added back. When the names aren’t hyperlinked, it makes it an extra step or two to get to the person’s Twitter page. Here’s what a message page looks like without the names hyperlinked:

Today, I took some time out and created a tiny little Firefox extension called Twitter Link (TL) which will add those links back. After installing TL here’s the same page with the missing hyperlink back:

This would have been ideally suited for a Greasemonkey script, but I decided to make it standalone for those who don’t use Greasemonkey. Twitter Link v0.1 adds the text “TL” to the status bar so you know it’s enabled. I’ll probably remove that in the next version though. TL will ignore email links and it only works on twitter.com at this time. I thought about leaving it open to work on any site with @name since it ignores linking email@address.com, but could easily enable that in TL v0.2 or later if others wanted it.

What happens when twitter.com adds back the hyperlinks? Just disable or uninstall the plugin from the TOOLS->Add-ons menu. Feel free to leave any comments/feedback about the plugin below.

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