Used Summify yet? It sends you a daily email of links shared by the people you follow on Twitter. I like it so much it’s become part of my daily routine, but it’s missing a few features I want. The summary doesn’t show the content of the tweets that include the link – were the posters being sarcastic, or commenting on it? And it doesn’t show everything linked, so I don’t know what I’ve missed that from my Twitter feed that day.

Enter Showshares, a weekend hack that tried to solve both of my problems, and ended up solving a different one. It’s a pure JavaScript app that uses Remy Sharp’s twitterlib and Embedly‘s, er, embedder (they call it a Social CDN), plus the usual all-star supporting cast of Underscore.js, jQuery and Twitter’s Bootstrap. Pay a visit, run a search and see the results.

The full text from the tweets and embedded links are there, but Showshares works from searches rather than user timelines. At the time of writing, reading a user’s timeline with the Twitter API requires oAuth authentication, which can’t be done entirely client side (well, there’s an interesting way around this using Yahoo’s YQL, but it’s a bit more elaborate that I wanted to get into).

It’s straightforward to plug a timeline into this view, and it just needs a server underneath for user authentication. The code’s on github if you’d like to add that or see how it works.