Out of curiosity, what third-party APIs are you using that return "time ago" attributes but no standard date attribute (e.g, ISO 8601, RFC 822)? I hope never to have that misfortune. This would be great for scraping, though.
Thanks for sharing this. But why is it a jQuery plugin? It's a single function that iterates over an array, just as suited for a library or node.js module as a webpage; a dependency on a DOM library seems out of place.