How to post links to twitter from Safari

March 10, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania

Twitter is a status updating/messaging platform that has gained immense popularity over the past few years, and there are a lot of applications both for mobile devices as well as computers that allow you to read and post to your Twitter account. A lot of people use Twitter to share web links to blog posts they may have written or found interesting. Twitter imposes a limit of 140 characters for each message, which means that links need to be shortened using a URL shortening service such as TinyURL . I came across Safari140 recently. This is a really neat plugin for the Safari web browser that allows you to post links to your Twitter account directly from your web browser. What’s really cool about this plugin is that it does all the hard work of shortening the URL, which makes posting a link to Twitter quickly and easy.

Head over to the Safari140 to download the plugin. Safari140 is a free download. Note that MacOS X Leopard is a requirement for Safari140. Click on the download link to begin the download. Once the download completes the installation should begin automatically. If it does not launch double click on the downloaded file to launch the installation.

The installation process is pretty straightforward. Hit Continue a few times over and enter your password for the installation to finish. After the installation completes you will need to quit and relaunch Safari. To do that go to the Safari web browser and hit the key combination Cmd + Q. Now launch Safari again. Check to see if you have a new entry in Safari File menu called Post to Twitter. The installation of Safari140 is now complete.

At this point I’m assuming that you already have an account with Twitter. If not, please head to Twitter.com and create an account. It’s free and it only takes a few minutes to create a new account. Let’s get started with using Safari140. Head to a web page in Safari that you’d like to share with your Twitter friends. Click on File -> Post to Twitter to launch Safari140. You can also use the keyboard shortcut for this, Ctrl + T. You will see window pop-up in your browser like in the image below, asking you to enter your account information.

Enter your Twitter account information in the pop-up window, then hit the Done button. This login pop-up only comes up once, it then saves your username and password, so you can post to Twitter with ease. After you hit the Done button you will get another pop-up that looks like one below. This is where you enter your Twitter post. Safari140 will grab the page’s title, and shorten the url ready for posting, allowing you to post this directly to Twitter, with the option to customize the post.

After you are done entering the text for the post hit the Post to Twitter to complete posting. It’s a pretty simple process, which is really nice. It can be quite a time saver for the folks who are heavy-duty Twitter users.

Safari140 is not by any means a full-fledged Twitter client like the dozen or so Firefox plugins such as Twitbin which allows you to post to as well as read from your Twitter feed. However, the added features come at a cost - a sidebar. By allowing users to only post to their Twitter feed Safari140 has been able to eliminate the need to add anything at all to the browser interface; no buttons, no sidebar or a bar or any other kind.

Overall Safari140 is a great application that does what its supposed to pretty well and without much of a hassle. However, there are a couple of shortcomings I found in the application. The first is that it does not support multiple Twitter accounts, which would have been really nice to have. The other, which, to me, is a major shortcoming is that I could not find a way to switch user accounts once I was logged into a Twitter account in Safari140. One could use a silly hack to overcome this, which is to reset the Twitter account password from the website, forcing Safari140 to request you to log in again. Throw in these two features and I think this application will be heading places.