Weekend mode for Twitter clients

I love weekends because (usually) I can get more work done because there are fewer emails, tweets, news items, IMs, and so on to distract me from writing code.

I actually keep my Twitter clients turned off on the weekends.

But I still check Twitter from time to time in case there’s a mention I should reply to, or in case there’s something that people are linking to that I should know about.

What I’d love to have is a “weekend mode” in my client. (Or it could even be a separate client.) The weekend mode would show me only mentions, direct messages, and items with links. However, the items-with-links would not include yfrog and similar links: if it’s just a picture of someone’s sushi or their wacky goldfish, I can skip it.

It should do Growl notifications for mentions and direct messages. Items-with-links wouldn’t trigger a notification, but perhaps there would be an unread count in the Dock icon for the app.

Also, importantly, all shortened URLs would be lengthened for display, since that helps me decide if a link is worth looking at. If it’s at YouTube, probably not, but if it’s at CNN, it might be important news. (There might even be a blacklist — filter out links to certain sites, or filter out based on type of site. If I could tell the app I don’t care about photos, I wouldn’t see links to Flickr, SmugMug, and so on.)

Anyway — it could be just me who’d like and use weekend mode. Maybe everybody else wants the regular thing all the time. So don’t nobody add this feature or write this app unless you’re convinced that other people would like it too.

But I’d probably use it for more than just weekends. Nights too, and any days when I’m busier than normal.