Removing Twitter's Recommended User to Follow "Feature"

#newtwitter fixes here: New Twitter Fixes: Remove Who to Follow and More!

waves at all the shiny new people

Hi, Internet! I must admit, I am sort of stunned at the response to this post. I thought if the lists annoyed me, there must be a few others out there who agreed. A few. That's my understatement for the decade. Thanks to all of you for the tweets, retweets, kind words - being called 'awesome sauce' isn't bad for the ego - and general sharing of this tweak. I'm doubly pleased because I love whipping stupid applications into line, it's sort of a hobby of mine.

For those of you who are new, here are a few highlights: simple, flaky biscuit recipe (#1 on Google!), a no-cook ice cream recipe (yes, with eggs)), and one of my favorites, Dear PETA, women are animals too... I also have a brand new site, Not Like Normal People, that you might want to check out. Oh yeah, see that ad on the top of the sidebars? Apparently I wrote a cookbook, too. (Much as I love sharing the tweaks, this self-promotional stuff is killing me but a friend sent mail and threatened to hack my site and do this if I didn't do it myself.)

Thanks again for coming by to snag the browser tweaks, I'm really, really happy to share!

Do you hate those recommendations from twitter as much as I do? Rhetorical question, I know. It seems to be the new thing to hate - and with good reason this time. It just recommended I follow someone who blocked me when I wrote Cook's Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knife Roll. Last straw, much?

I decided there must be a way to kill the suckers. You know what? There is a reason they call me Application Goddess. Done in 12 minutes. Take that, twitter.

Want to know how? Here you go, in all my technical author, bullet listed, click-on-sh*t glory. Scroll down for Internet Explorer, Chromium, Chrome, Safari (yes on Macs, too) and Opera! Oddly, the div ma,es didn't always work exactly the same in the different browsers, so if you find something that isn't quite right, please let me know.

Edited to add these links:

Twitter Hovercards: Die.die.die - How to get rid of the popups on twitter avatars.

Twitter, twitter, twitter...I do not care who else follows them... - Remove this list.

Twitter, twitter, twitter...I also do not care who we both follow...... - this is down temporarily because they are changing it around...back shortly...

Talk to me about Facebook... - What bits do you love, hate, use, not? Let's chat...

Lots of steps for lots of browsers after the jump...

To remove the Recommended Followers list from Twitter

If you are using Firefox

1. Install Firefox
2. Install AdBlock Plus
3. Start Firefox and go to Twitter.
4. Click on the arrow on the right of the AdBlock Icon
5. Select Preferences from the dropdown list.
6. Click Add Filter
7. Paste in this string: ##*#recommended-similar-users
8. Click Add Filter
9. Paste in this string: ##*#recommended_users
10. You want to do this slowly so you can savor it.. Look at the recommendations list. Really look at it.
11. Click OK.
12. Poof! Sucker be gone.

If you are using Internet Explorer

1. Install IE7Pro
2. Start Internet Explorer
3. Select IE7 Pro Preferences from the Tools menu.
4. Under Modules, select the Ad Blocker checkbox. Click OK.
5. Close and restart Internet Explorer.
6. Select IE7 Pro Preferences from the Tools menu.
7. Select Ad Blocker on the list on the left.
8. In the Filter Type dropdown list, select Div Filter.
9. Click Add Filter
10. Paste "recommended_users" (no quotes) in the Rule line. Click Add.
11. Click Add Filter
12. Paste "recommended-similar-users" (no quotes) in the Rule line. Click Add.
13. Click OK.
14. No more annoying suggestions from twitter!

If you are using Chromium or Chrome

These may be slightly less exact because I am rebuilding them from a tweet. If you do it and I screwed something up, let me know and I will tweak it. Thanks to Ed Borasky for these instructions.

1. Select Extensions from the Tools menu.
2. Select AdBlock
3. Select Options
4. Blacklist: twitter.com##div[id="recommended_users"]
5. Blacklist: twitter.com##div[id="recommended-similar-users"]
6. There is probably an OK or two to click but I am just guessing.
7. No more annoying suggestions from twitter!

If you are using Opera

1. Download this file: user.css Save it to somewhere you can find it again. It doesn't matter where you put it, other than not in a temp directory where it will get lost. Your documents folder, root of your drive, whatever.
2. Start Opera
3. Select Page, Style, Manage Modes from the Menu flyout.
4. On the Display tab, enter the location of the file you just downloaded (including the filename) into the line below My style sheet. You can browse to the location if you prefer.
5. Select the Presentation Modes tab. Make sure that My style sheet is checked on the Author Mode Default mode is Author mode. Click OK.
6. Restart Opera.
7. Ta da!

side of the tab and that the

If you are using Safari (Mac/Windows)

Download this gizmo, it does exactly this. Follow Freely, a Safari Extension for Twitter (thanks to Brooks Ayola for this link and cooklocal for testing it on a Mac.)

If you are using another browser

As irinarempt pointed out in comments, the user.css stylesheet works with Konqueror, and (duh) with any browser that honours user stylesheets. So you, with the obscure browser, pretend it's Opera, grab that stylesheet and use it.

Internet, you are welcome.

I believe the only major browser missing is Atomic for the iPad, which I don't happen to have lying around. If someone would like to send me one to play with, I'd be happy to figure it out. If you have another OS/browser combination not listed here, let me know and if we can figure it out between us, I'll add it here. (I'd also like to apologize to feed subscribers who have gotten multiple copies of this non-food as I have updated. I believe I am done. Well, unless someone sends me an iPad.)