Great feedback, will surely make this change.
Regarding better ways to consume Twitter, our core product Mailbrew does just that, since it lets you create "digests" of Twitter users and Lists.
To give some context, we indeed make these "side projects" hoping to drive signups and engagements to our core projects (Mailbrew and Typefully), but we always do them with the same care of main project, focusing on utility and user experience.
Typefully itself, now an essential part of our business, was born as a Mailbrew side project.
Even Feeds Mage, while it may appear silly to some people, could actually be further developed to become a great discovery tool for the Twitter social graph. In a way these projects are always also long terms bets for us, even when they're small bets that took 2 weeks to build, like in this case.
Doesn't seem like it's done with the same level of care though. I checked the other projects, and although Typefully for example follows almost the exact same aggressive flyover popup thing that obstructs interaction with the background before getting that number counter to flip one more time via a sign up, it still has the "try instead" link.
FeedMage still does not. For a service that was built in 2 weeks, adding a tiny hide button shouldn't take more than 3 days.
While you're free to do whatever you see fit for your business and brand, I'm just letting you know that people pick up on this. IMO tactics and darkpatterns like this are the root of a lot of awfulness on the web (but that's another matter). To me this is really disrespectful to your company's user base and the fact that it's still (checked as I'm typing this comment) doesn't have a close option sort of proves it. Even those aggressive ads have a tiny albeit hidden "x".
This looks super interesting, but before I understand exactly what this is I'm not ready to give it access to my twitter, so maybe allow the modal to be closed so I can check the webpage :-)
I have been thinking about ways to consume twitter in better ways, one idea I had was to feed each follow onto a RSS and there are a few services that can do that(I think). But the problem is that with the advent and heavy use of threads everything is backwards.
If this can make each follow into a separate rss feed and then group threads into posts (the feed can be delayed or update old posts when new comments are added, either would be fine).