'Twitter Goggles’ Script Lets You Read Twitter As Someone Else

Someone has written a script on GitHub that allows you to view Twitter through another user's eyes.

A TV producer and writer who works on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Rob Dubbin got the idea when Twitter announced it was making some changes to how users saw their timelines, experimenting with algorithmic timelines instead of chronological ones.

"I started thinking about ways to change up my timeline myself, in a way that gave me some control versus making me a more attractive promoted-tweet target for Dove Men's Soaps or whatever," he told me via email.

The script in its current form uses the Twitter Lists feature, so instead of messing with your own timeline, you can turn someone else's data into a List and toggle back and forth. Running the script requires Python, Tweepy (which is Twitter for Python), and Twitter API credentials. Once you've got access to the API, running the script is pretty simple—by editing one line, you can generate as many new lists for as many users as you'd like.

"First I tried a thing where I bulk unfollowed everyone, picked someone I'd been following at random, then repopulated my following list with everyone that random person was following," Dubbin says. He learned via his followers that he wasn't the first to experiment with this idea, either. "Charlie Warzel had written about doing something similar for BuzzFeed like two years ago, [and] apparently a feature like this was in TweetDeck for a while, but got disabled recently."

Dubbin then decided to use Twitter Lists instead, since users were getting annoyed by him constantly following and unfollowing them for the sake of the experiment. And he decided to open-source it, so anyone could give it a try. (It turns out EFF activist Parker Higgins also toyed with a similar method back in December.)

Clearly there's an appeal to the idea of viewing Twitter as someone else. There's even an app called Being that enables users to do the same thing on Instagram.

"I called it Twitter Goggles because it really did feel like looking at Twitter through a different pair of eyes," Dubbin says. Whether you're motivated by curiosity, nosiness, or just want to find some new people to follow, go ahead and slip those Goggles on.