Twitter's Secret “Guest Mode”

You can "follow" accounts without becoming a follower in normal mode too. I frequently do this just to keep timelines clear.

All you have to do is add an account to a private list (without following them) and then view the timeline for that list. I really only ever interact with Twitter through Tweetbot (tear today!) or Tweetdeck, so I have one list I call "The Group" that is a highly curated list of folks I actually want to see stuff from, and a few other lists of accounts that are intermittently interesting but that I don't need to actually follow.

Because following an account is akin to an endorsement or at least a weak association in a way, this method is also interesting when it would be useful to stay updated with an account without strictly associating it. (Some will immediately think of political accounts or counter-culture accounts; I actually use it when following companies that I might need to see news from like my utility but that I don't want to say "Hey spam me with your PR!")

I love these kind of legacy features. Remindse of better times when sites could be handled, albiet more basically, by small dinky devices.

At various times I've written "graceful degredation/progressive enhancement"-friendly versions of work internal sites so people working on the floor could access them...from a scan gun running Windows mobile.

Was it pretty? Not really. Did it respond well to only having arrow keys and a numpad? I tried, would like to day yet, but who can say. You can't optimize for the ux without previous experience as a user imho.

I wonder what other legacy, potentially useful features lurk behind user-agent gates. For example, you can get messages to work on the mobile version of Facebook by switching to a very old user agent. Maybe I should just permanently switch to an IE6 user agent, I wonder how many websites would still show the popup to encourage me to get a decent browser.

Cool find! For those wanting to experiment on iOS, I’ve found a list of UA-modifying browser apps here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/40647/is-there-a-w...

Haven’t tested them yet, however.

EDIT:

On Chrome, I've found that adding a custom device on the dev console and spoofing the UA-String to be "Lynx/2.8.8dev.3 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1" works well :)

I am curious if anyone tested these legacy end points / cookie inputs for sql injection (or something along those lines).

Welp, that's going away soon, no doubt.

It's probably for situations like displaying tweets on a wall or something

Pretty sweet find! Thanks for sharing!

Well thats neat! Thanks for sharing!