Since the demise of Twitter’s Jabber server, I’ve been frustrated with pretty much every client I’ve tried. And I’ve used a few:
- twhirl – doesn’t stop scrolling up when it’s out of focus
- twibble – random crappiness, memory leaks, poor recovery from posting failures
- tweetdeck – doesn’t remember the groups you set up so if you accidentally close them you’re screwed, and also doesn’t work on 64-bit linux (same applies to twhirl – it’s an Adobe Air issue)
- a couple of console clients, all just sort of generally crap. Mainly frustrated by their inability to scroll backwards – I like being able to not look at twitter for a few hours without missing out on stuff 🙂
So here’s my ideal client. I’m going to start writing it on Wednesday, once school’s done.
- works with an irc client. I ❤ irc, and I can keep it running on my shell server, accessible from anywhere.
- search functionality: I want to be able to join a channel and have that act as the search term on summize / twitter search such that /join #search-25C3 shows me the results for this search in real(ish) time.
- groups functionality (like tweetdeck) – I’d like to be able to set up groups of followees to see only their tweets. There are a couple of reasons for this: wanting to have a “quiet” group containing just the people I care most about, avoiding what on LiveJournal is termed “unfriending drama”, grouping friends geographically, or whatever. But it’s been sorely lacking in my Twitter experience so far.
- keyword exclusion – if I don’t want to hear any more about #AnnoyingVendorCon, I want to be able to exclude it from the tweets I’m getting.
- proper IRC direct message functionality: dm’s should show up as /msg windows.
- following and unfollowing from within the client – this hasn’t worked properly in twibble for a while.
I’m going to start working off Mike Verdone’s existing Python Twitter Tools – should be a good start.
hypatia dot ca 