Twitter tools

• gtwitter (Ubuntu)
  • http://code.google.com/p/gtwitter/
• gwibber (Ubuntu)
• prism-twitter (Ubuntu)
• qwit (SuSE)

• 1   Twitter Web site
  • 1.1   TwitterFox
  • 1.2   PowerTwitter
• 2   Yoono
• 3   TweetDeck
• 4   Twitux
• 5   Gwibber
• 6   Pidgin
  • 6.1   Twitter
  • 6.2   Twitgin

1   Twitter Web site

http://twitter.com offers a kind of main interface with all possibilities (either friendly or less friendly), and other tools (meant as improvements) offer browser links ot the main site for many subsidiary tasks. So it is unavoidable.

1.1   TwitterFox

This Firefox extension may be installed and be triggered when visiting the Twitter main site. But then, the site becomes irritatingly slow (maybe because of JavaScript?), especially when visiting the home page of other Twitters. Despite attracting features, ths speed issue just makes it unusable to me.

1.2   PowerTwitter

Another Firefox add-on.

2   Yoono

This tool seems solid and professional, with an extremely polishedd interface, It has a great deal of features besides Twitter, almost too many of them. The Facebook interface is surprisingly complete. Seduced at first, I found it too invasive after a while, and decided for something simpler. AIR-based.

3   TweetDeck

This is undoubtedly a very interesting tool, and probably one of the most popular, even if not perfect. AIR-based. See TweetDeck for details.

4   Twitux

Simple, yet featured enough to be useful. Can explore all timelines, and take most common actions. Standard on both SuSE and Ubuntu. It seems that it does not handle more than 100 following. The friend menu is also presented unsorted.

To synchronize: ~/.gnome2/twitux/

For installing version 0.69 on SuSE, the following packages were pre-required: enchant-devel, gconf2-devel, gnome-doc-utils-devel, intltool, iso-codes-devel, libcanberra-devel, libnotify-devel, libsexy-devel and libsoup-devel.

cd /var/tmp

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/twitux/twitux-0.69.tar.bz2

tar xfj twitux-0.69.tar.bz2

cd twitux-0.69

./configure --prefix=/usr

make

sudo make install

Installing the same on Ubuntu (Hardy) required GTK+ 2.14.0, but as the installed version was 2.12.9, I stopped there.

5   Gwibber

• https://launchpad.net/gwibber

This young tool is more limited than TweetDeck, but is fairly promising. Having stability problems, it might not be ready yet for the big works. Python-based.

On SuSE, fails with Couldn't retrieve GConf value for key: secret_key. On Ubuntu, requires non-standard, unsigned libwebkit.

6   Pidgin

Two Twitter plugins exist for Pidgin, and they behave quite differently.

To synchronize: ~/.purple

6.1   Twitter

• Identified as Twitter Protocol at account creation
• Opens one separate buddy for each following
• Burns a lot of CPU at initialization
• Segfaults systematically (probably over a certain number of following)

6.2   Twitgin

• Identified as TwitterIM at account creation
• Also supports identica and laconica (through mbpurple)
• Should explicitly activate the plugin
• A single timeline from all following, may mark as favorite, retweet
• Extra commands
  • /replies - get replies timeline
  • /refresh - refresh tweets now
  • /refresh_rate - set refresh rate. /refresh_rate 120 temporarily changes refresh rate to 120 seconds
  • /tag - prepend everything with a specified tag
  • /btag - append everything with a specified tag
  • /untag - unset already set tag
• Even with /replies, the result is inserted in the timeline and progressively scrolled away. Another /replies will reissue the same contents.