See Where People Tweet From, Right in Your Feed
Ever scroll through your Twitter feed and wonder where everyone is actually from? The location info in a profile is often missing, set to a joke, or just too vague. It's hard to get a quick sense of the global conversation.
A new browser extension tackles this by doing something simple yet effective: it displays a country flag emoji right next to usernames. It's a small addition that adds a whole new layer of context to your timeline.
What It Does
The Twitter Account Location in Username extension is a lightweight tool that automatically detects and appends a country flag to Twitter display names. It works by analyzing the location field in a user's profile, using a clever mapping system to translate common location names (like "New York" or "London") into their corresponding country codes and, ultimately, flag emojis.
No more guessing if "London" means the one in the UK or Canada. The extension does the parsing for you and places the flag emoji directly in the username, making it instantly visible as you scroll.
Why It's Cool
The clever part isn't just the idea, but the implementation. The project uses a fuzzy matching library to handle the messy reality of user-inputted location data. People write their locations in a thousand different ways, and this tool is built to handle that ambiguity gracefully.
For developers, it's a great example of a practical browser extension built with modern JavaScript. The code is clean and well-structured, making it an excellent reference if you're thinking of building your own extension. It solves a real, albeit small, problem with a focused solution.
How to Try It
Ready to see it in action? The extension is open source and available on GitHub.
- Head over to the repository: github.com/RhysSullivan/twitter-account-location-in-username
- Follow the installation instructions in the README. It's a straightforward process of cloning the repo, loading it as an unpacked extension in Chrome/Edge/Brave, and you're good to go.
Refresh your Twitter feed, and you'll instantly see the flags next to usernames.
Final Thoughts
This is one of those small quality-of-life improvements that just makes sense. It doesn't change how Twitter works; it just gives you a little more information at a glance. As a developer, I appreciate tools that are simple, functional, and built to solve a specific itch. It's also a neat project to poke around in if you're curious about how browser extensions are built.
What do you think? Would you find this useful in your daily scroll?
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