The first is much like our favorite Google script, which adds Twitter search results to the top of Google search results pages. Pennsylvania software developer, Billy DiStefano, published Twitter Search Results on Bing 30 minutes ago. Mattie Casper, a Principal Design Engineer at Citrix Systems, published a script called Bing Cleaner earlier this morning. Here's what Bing looks like with these scripts running, and short instructions on installing them.

In the image above, Twitter search results are slapped onto the top of the results column and the related resources column is moved from the left of the page to the right. That's a nice change as it makes search results the first thing the eye sees when starting on the left.

If you haven't used any Greasemonkey scripts before, see the instructions and video in our post How to Use Greasemonkey in Less Than 5 Minutes. It's just a browser plug-in and it's really easy to use.

Once you have Greasemonkey installed, just visit the two script links above, click to install, and you are ready to rock and roll. I just added Bing to my Drag and Drop Zones search interface as well, so I'll be able to give it a better test run.

We look forward to seeing what else the Greasemonkey community comes up with for Bing, but we suspect that these first two scripts will be the most useful.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different web sites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.

For nontechnical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.

How do I Use It?

Below you'll find a four minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox

There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.

We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.

Questions? Suggestions?

If there's anything unclear about this, let us know and we or our readers will respond in questions. Likewise, if there are Greasemonkey scripts you think readers here should be sure to see - let us know what they are.

VideoSurf, which by itself is a very good video search engine, uses its proprietary algorithms to identify the most interesting moments in these videos and allows you to jump right to them by clicking on the images in the film strip.

The only problem with this script is that it won't take you to directly to YouTube or MetaCafe to see the video, but to VideoSurf itself. This makes sense, given that the script is a way to promote VideoSurf's search engine, but it would be nice if you could have a choice of destinations.

Overall, this is one of the coolest and more useful Greasemonkey scripts we have seen lately and definitely worth a try.

Here is how to install the script:

1. Install the Greasemonkey extension for FireFox (if you don't have it installed already) and restart your browser.
2. Click on this link to the script and then follow the instructions on screen.
3. You're done. Start searching!

Scripts that make calls specific to Greasemonkey will most likely not work yet. If you are looking for compatible scripts, the developer suggests that you start with scripts that are already compatible with Safari or Opera, which limits your choices, but it's important to keep in mind that this is only a first release.

We tried out the oAutoPagerize script for Safari, and it seemed to work right out of the box. Your mileage with other script may vary.

Note: To run Greasemetal, you have to start the Greasemetal executable and not Chrome itself.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different websites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.

For non-technical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.

How Do I Use It?

Below, you'll find a 4-minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox

There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.

We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.

Questions? Suggestions?

If there's anything unclear about this, let us know and we or our readers will respond to questions. Likewise, if there are Greasemonkey scripts you think readers here should be sure to see - let us know what they are.

But what about the iPhone? Greasemonkey on the iPhone would be the ultimate interface hack for what's got to be the best interface available today. Enter GreasePocket, an experimental effort to provide just that.

GreasePocket is a personal project of MIT grad Ishan Anand, a developer at NextMobileWeb and the technical editor of the Wrox Professional iPhone and iPod touch Programming.

It's a proof of concept stage framework for adding user scripts to web pages in Safari on the iPhone and it debuted at last weekend's iPhone Devcamp.

The Roadmap

Anand says he's working after hours to open source GreasePocket and hopes that the one big problem it faces can be solved by the right person. Specifically, Anand hasn't figured out how to seperate GreasePocket scripts from 3rd party website javascript in Webkit on the iPhone. That means big security holes, like the ability for 3rd party sites to detect your location using your iPhone's GPS without your knowledge. Back in 2005, Greasemonkey developers fixed two holes like this in the Firefox userscript frame work but Anand hasn't found a solution yet for the iPhone.

High Hopes

Interface design is a fabulous art form, but it's impossible for web sites to be built in such a way that it suits every user and it's unlikely that any individual designer can think of all the awesome features that a world of developers writing user scripts can.

If blogging was the key step in the democratization of content production, user scripts represent the democratization of user interface design.

Would Apple let an app like this into the iPhone App store? Not in its current state, that's for sure. Anand says there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for Apple to expand its APIs to allow user scripts to run in a separate container, either, other than to help GreasePocket function.

That actually seems like a very compelling reason to us.

Called simply Facebook Keyboard Navigation, the tool requires the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey - a powerful browser customization tool you can learn to make even more advanced use of in 5 minutes.

There are 15 keystroke shortcuts out of the box, but by going through your Firefox menus Toolkits, Greasemonkey, manage scripts then select that script and hit edit - then you can make some additional customization. It's a remarkably simple script, just look at the format in the file and either change or add to it in the same way.

I assigned the letter "R" to jump to my Facebook list of "real friends" by grabbing the part of that list's URL that follows facebook.com, pasting it into the edited script and saving. I then had to reload Facebook but sure enough, it works great.

Once you've done that, try the Facebook Fixer script. These are all remarkably easy to use and they make life so much better!

In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it's hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.

Memeorandum, like Techmeme, tracks hot conversations in the blogosphere by seeing who is linking to whom. Every 5 minutes these sites check to see what the break out topics are and then organize them by link-hub and conversation links. See the screenshot I took a few minutes ago.

Memeorandum Colors takes the history of what 50,000 blogs indexed by Memeorandum have linked to and analyzes them for patterns. Schachter and Baio found that there were two clear groups of blogs that tended to link together. Presumably they looked at them and determined that one group was conservative and the other, liberal. Interestingly, the two ran the same algorithm on the blogs in Techmeme and found that the blogs there are split into two groups as well - business vs. technology.

The Greasemonkey script then color codes each blog in shades of red or blue, depending on how consistently they've linked with the conservative or liberal pack in the past. The end result is that when you load the Memeorandum site, you can see which kinds of blogs are clustering around a common node, which story nodes are of such general interest that they cross party lines and which brave conservative blogs step out of the norm and link to liberal sources and vice versa. This author was just complaining yesterday about how hard it is to find out what liberal blogs have to say about conservative conversations on Memeorandum without a lot of knowledge about who the leading blogs are in each camp. Problem solved!

This is an awesome example of the kinds of magic services that can be created by analyzing aggregate data around user generated content. We love this kind of stuff.

If you've never used Greasemonkey before, we assure you - it's much easier than it sounds! Just download the official Firefox plug-in and then click on any Greasemonkey script link to install it. Honestly, two or three mouse clicks and you're cooking with gas. If it helps you can watch our screencast How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes.

For an in depth technical discussion of how Memorandum Colors was created and to grab the Memeorandum Colors script, see Baio's fabulous blog Waxy.org. I'm off to see what moderate conservative blogs have to say about reports of extreme hostility at Republican political rallies!

This week: Greasemonkey mayhem, Ajax fever, Web Design Minimalism mojo, Blogpoly Fun!, Yahoo Music Engine rave.

Greasemonkey gives power to power users

What is Greasemonkey? According to the homepage, it's "a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior." In laymans terms, it's a Firefox add-on that lets users monkey around with any webpage - change its data, design, or functionality. Greasemonkey gives practical meaning to the term 'read/write web', because it literally enables users to re-write a webpage.

It's creating a stir in the developer community right now, as evidenced by Mark Pilgrim's latest book: Dive Into Greasemonkey. That's for the technical-minded. The best business-oriented introduction I've read on Greasemonkey was by a blogger called Nivi, who thinks Greasemonkey will "blow up business models". He gives examples, such as adding competitor pricing to an Amazon page. 

For the Web wonks amongst us, this is an interesting quote from Nivi:

Time will tell whether that is true, but it's a tempting metaphor for Web 2.0...

Ajax Fever

Ajax is another hot technology in the Web 2.0 world, evidenced by the recent Ajax Summit hosted by O'Reilly and Adaptive Path. Ajax stands for 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML', but you can get a better idea of what it is by using Google's Gmail and Google Maps. Derek Powazek explains:

This week Flickr announced they were converting from Flash to Ajax - further proof that Ajax is a defining technology of Web 2.0.

Web Design Minimalism

Have you noticed how many weblogs have taken to stripping away all their bells and whistles and gone all minimalist? The most recent one I've noticed is Tom Coates' excellent blog plasticbag. Jarrod Piccioni has been following this trend and notes:

His point being that the content is the most important element. Jarrod's post has some great tips for bloggers who want to ensure their content is the main attraction. Also check out Noah Brier's advice to design for your content, "rather than against it".

Blogpoly

My Wrap-Up has been a bit techie this week, so for some light relief have a look at Blogpoly - a variation of the game Monopoly. Not only is it an accurate visual overview of the Web 2.0 world, it's also a lot of fun! For example: del.icio.us, Bloglines and Technorati occupy the coveted orange spots (where I used to try and stack all my hotels - a common strategy for every Monopoly player back in the day...); Wikipedia and Creative Commons are the two public utilities; and "Chance" and "community chest" become "comment" and "trackback".

Techie Post of the Week: Yahoo Music Engine

Lucas Gonze pointed me to a beauty of a post written by Ian Rogers, one of the developers of the new Yahoo! Music Engine. OK, it's a breathless account of something he helped build, but the sheer enthusiasm in this post made me forget about the obvious bias. For example this passage:

You can tell Ian really believes in this product - aren't blogs great! And oh to have a job like that, where you love what you do for a living (OK, I'm getting there...slowly).

That's a wrap for another week!™

nb: The photo of the dog and its long tail is from Anil Dash's Flickr photo stream.

Greasemonkey is easy to use, fast and powerful. Most scripts are hosted and discussed at Userscripts.org, but that site can be a little overwhelming. In the past week, 375 scripts were added or updated. We looked through them all and picked out the best 5. Below we've also posted a screencast that will get you started harmlessly hacking your browser with Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes.

RSS readers can click here to view the video below.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Here's a Flash version, if you prefer it.)

Now What?

There are a lot of must-use Greasemonkey scripts that have been published before this week. Some of our favorites include:

Autopagerize - continuous scrolling from page to page on many websites.

Twitter Search on Google Results Pages - add real-time search to Google.

Memeorandum Colors - color code links on political blog aggregator Memeorandum by the politics of each blog's linking history.

Those are oldies-but-goodies but more and more scripts are available every day. Here are our favorite 5, in no particular order, out of the 375 that were added to or updated on Userscripts.org last week.

1. Gmail 3.0 Productivity Package - adds links to create new Google Docs and integrates other Google services into the GMail interface.

2. Alltop Topic Search and OPML

Guy Kawasaki's Alltop has aggregated the top sources on a long list of topics. This script makes it even more useful by allowing you to search inside each category's archives and export the RSS feeds for all the selected sources into another RSS reader.

3. Google Search Sidebar with Youtube , Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and Flickr Results

In the image above you can see the Twitter Google script results at the top of the page (described above) and this Wikipedia, etc. script on the right hand sidebar. The script works well.

4. Cookie Life Extender

Sick of having to log back in to sites all the time? This script rewrites the expiration date on all cookies in your browser, making them live for 50 years!

5. Vidzbigger

This script makes a bunch of changes to YouTube video pages. It displays the largest video player available, moves the comments into the right sidebar so you can view them while watching the video and it inserts links to download a copy of all videos. It isn't the prettiest thing in the world and has the audacity to insert an ad overlay after videos are completed. It may not be pretty, but it's useful.

Those Are Our Favorites, What About You?

We'd love to hear about your favorite Greasemonkey scripts, too. There are so many of them out there that it's hard to unearth the best. There's nothing quite like it though, when you find a way to change the very browser you look at the web through.

A few lucky Gmail users are already seeing a 'Themes' tab appear in their settings menu, though as is typical for Google, it might take a day or two before this new feature has been rolled out to all users.

Google also announced a 'minor facelift' for the default Gmail interface to make it look 'crisper and cleaner.'

Dynamic Themes

Similar to the themes for iGoogle, some of these new themes also change according to the local weather and time of day, which is a neat effect, though obviously not very useful.

Overall, this is not a dramatic update to Gmail, but a lot of users have been waiting for this feature, and judging from the early reactions to the announcement we have seen so far, these new themes are going to be a quite popular.

That's exactly what we saw, though, when we got a sneak peak today at Omidyar's new product Ginx. We wrote about Ginx when PE Hub first caught wind of its funding last month. We hoped it would incorporate all kinds of data-intensive recommendation mystery awesomeness. It might later, but so far it's quite simple and we describe below how you can reproduce most of its functionality without changing your essential workflow and using a new tool.

The company insisted to us today that it is not a Twitter client, but it's pretty apparent that its first product is just that. It's a web based interface for Twitter that does a couple of things that are pretty cool, but it doesn't take a whole new company to get these things.

• Ginx prioritizes link sharing through Twitter by extending shortened URLs to their full length, placing a thumbnail from the destination page in your flow of tweets and opening links through a frame that displays the original message and a box to reply above the article being linked to.


• In addition to a tab for replies, Ginx also offers tabs for messages with links in them and messages with links you've clicked on already - so you can go back and find them.


• When viewing a user's profile page, you have the option to view a stream of their friends' messages.


• Click on a #hashtag and you can see a page with just messages containing that tag.

Neat, huh? If this paradigm can be extended out into all kinds of social media sharing, which Ginx's parent company Peer News certainly intends to do though it won't offer any details yet, then that doesn't sound so bad. It will really depend on how good the interface is, because we're not seeing anything wildly innovative here in terms of functionality.

Ginx is in private beta so you can't test it out yet, but if this is the kind of Twitter experience you're looking for, here's what you can do.

First, take 5 minutes to install Greasemonkey - it'll change the way you experience the web.

Then, install this Greasemonkey script and you'll see nested conversations on all Twitter pages.

Next, add this Greasemonkey script and you'll see public replies to any user in the right hand sidebar of their profile page. That's more meaningful than just the messages of everyone they follow - those are the people who they have conversation with.

Now install this script and you'll get shortened URLs extended automatically. Install this one and you'll be able to see relative popularity of the various links via some shortened services.

That's going to take you ten minutes to do. Thanks to the people who put in the time and had the creativity to write those Greasemonkey scripts.

The other features of Ginx just don't seem so revolutionary. There are bookmarking and search services that make it easy enough to recall links. There's a lot of innovation possible in the microblogging and sharing space - but for early adopters at least, there's not much to get excited about yet in Ginx. Maybe they'll come up with something, but our hopes are no longer raised.

Update: We hate to post about Twitter twice in one night, but check out this preview of the new Tweetdeck - a 3rd party Twitter innovator showing how it's done.

A good Greasemonkey script will change your daily use of the web in ways you can't imagine being without. In the post below we highlight our seven favorite scripts published in the last month and offer a quick screencast that will show you how to use Greasemonkey in less than 5 minutes.

Earlier this year we made a post introducing new users to Greasemonkey and it's still one of our favorite things to point friends to. The words Greasemonkey and "scripts" might sound intimidating, but anyone can use them. It may take some technical skill to write these scripts, but anyone can use them to change their web experience.

RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

If you set up Greasemonkey and ad nothing but the old standby Autopagerize script, you'll already be thankful that you did!

Our Newest Favorites

Userscripts.org is the primary place to find new Greasemonkey scripts but there are literally hundreds posted every month. We took several hours this weekend to go through the last month of new and updated scripts on the site, we tested many more than we've highlighted here, and now we'd like to share our favorites. Some are new, some are just updated, all are very easy to use. Exploring all these scripts took a long time, but they can change how you use the web every day in just a few minutes.

We hope that after we share our favorites, you'll leave comments pointing us to scripts we haven't found yet.

Learning Page Popularity

Google Reader Subscriber Count

Google Reader has an API that will show you how many subscribers a feed has there. This script puts that number in a little box in the bottom right corner of any page with Google Reader subscribers. For most blogs you can multiply this number by 2 or 3 and get an estimate of the total number of subscribers in all RSS readers.

You can find out all kinds of interesting things with this script. I knew, for example, that web comic XKCD was wildly popular - but I wouldn't have suspected it was as popular as it is. Now I know. (To tell the truth it was another Greasemonkey script, Google FX, that pointed me at XKCD as a related search in earlier testing!) I also know that the "featured slideshows" feed at Slideshare.net has hardly any subscribers at all - that's a shame but it makes me think I could find more hidden treasures there.

For Gmail

Change gmail logo

Many of us spend hours every day using GMail but that doesn't mean we have to look at the official GMail logo all the time. This script makes it easy to put a different image in that space. In this case there are a couple of steps involved, but it's really not that hard.

Once you've got Greasemonkey installed, go to the link for this script and add that too. Then, follow the link on the script page to the image file converter and upload the image you want to make your new Gmail logo. The converter page will give you a long set of characters that you can copy and paste into the Greasemonkey script on your computer. Just go in your browser to the "tools" menu, then Greasemonkey, then manage scripts. Select this one, edit it and then paste the code you got into the space in the file that's described in the instructions in the text file.

We tried a number of different image sizes, trying to keep our images from being cropped, and finally found success in a 115X60px shot of my fiancee and I at the beach where we got engaged! Now I look at that every time I open GMail instead of the GMail logo!

GMail Label Sorting

We're already using GMail labels more now that our most recently used ones are moved automatically to the top of the label list, thanks to this script. It works much better than numbering labels to overcome the alphabetization, as we've done before.

For Wikipedia

Add Wikidatabase History to Every Wikipedia Page

Wikipedia is great if you make sure not to take anything there on face value. A page's edit history is almost as important as its content and this script adds a drop down box on every page that shows its edit history.

For Videos

Video Embed

This script puts a video player on a page when there's a link to a YouTube page that appears. It's a time saver and will probably help you actually watch more videos that people are sharing if they are right there on the page for you. It can mess up the layout a little bit to have a video player thrown onto the page, but that's usually ok.

For Twitter

There are a whole lot of cool Greasemonkey scripts out there for Twitter, but here are some of our recent favorites. See the screen shot below to see how they all look together.

Add search to twitter sidebar

Search.twitter.com is really understated in its placement on the Twitter site. This script ads a search box to the sidebar of every Twitter page!

Twitter sidebar replies

It's always nice to get some context whenever looking at a person's Twitter profile page. This script places the most recent public replies they've received on their profile page sidebar.

Nested twitter replies

The lack of nested replies is something that people used to complain a lot about in Twitter. This script inserts them into every page - making previously one-sided conversations immediately comprehensible.

What Are Your Favorites?

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

The Ubiquity project aims to solve problems involving today's web applications and how we interact with them. Atul Varma describes this on his blog:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it's difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox's UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don't scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they're running on; and Greasemonkey doesn't prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

To solve these problems, they're developing Ubiquity which will let you apply textual commands (called "verbs") to whatever you're looking at on your screen.

As an example, say you found a typo on a friend's blog. Instead of copying and pasting the sentence into an email, you could use the Ubiquity UI to highlight the problem text then launch Gmail's compose screen with some default information already filled in (like "From the page Aza's Thoughts:) to introduce your email.

Atul also notes that the Ubiquity interface is currently activated via hotkeys, but that's just for the time being. Their ultimate goal is to have the program more deeply integrated with Firefox so it could be accessed from UIs that already exist - like contextual menus or the AwesomeBar.

To keep tabs on the status of the Ubiquity project or to download the code, you can visit their project page here.