Twitter Clients for Linux

bti

It is said that everyone talks on twitter but no one listens.  It's true. The existence of  bti is the proof. bti is short for Bash Twitter/Identica Idiocy. It 'allows you to pipe your bash input to twitter or identi.ca in an easy and fast manner to annoy the whole world' It's author @gregkh uses it for just that and he has 162 masochistic followers. If you also want to do the same, the bti man page suggests:

hook bti up to your bash shell, export the following variable:

PROMPT_COMMAND=´history 1 | sed -e "s/^s*[0-9]*s*//" | bti --bash´

Choqok

Iran is a hot topic on twitter these days and thousands of users have added a green tint to support Iranian demonstrators (they are hoping the ayatollah will get a headache after looking at those avatars). It might be appropriate for those users (I am one of them) to adapt choqok as their twitter client.  Choqok is said to be the ancient persian word for sparrow. This is a pretty decent software. If the authors could add suppport for groups, this could become a very good software.

Gwibber

If you don't like choqok, you might like Gwibber

Gwibber is a nice and simple client that can also be used to connect to other social network sites like Facebook, Flickr , Ping.fm (and few others). If you are a social network junkie this is for you. The downside to gwibber is that it doesn't have an direct messages tab (but everyone talks, no one listens and DM is mostly from spammers so who cares?). When the timeline is updated, the new tweets are shown as a floating popup even when gwibber is not minimized. Those tweets will not show up in the main window until you refresh. Fortunately this behaviour can be disabled by ticking off the 'Display Bubbles' option. Just wish they hadn't made it the default.

Mitter

Mitter is another gnome client but it's rather basic and doesn't have even the @replies tab. @replies are important because it shows that someone is listening to what you are saying. There are plenty more packages that you an easily install with yum but none of them seem to have any outstanding features. If you've seen one you have seen them all. One of them (twitux) didn't run at all but didn't even produce an error message (not even when run from the command line) to tell me what's wrong.

Pidgin

Another software perhaps worthy of mention is Pidgin - the unified IM system for Gnome. A plugin named purple-microblog is supposed to add support for twitter. Unfortunately even after adding the rpm, a twitter option didn't appear in the selection drop down. But there are plenty of other plugins for twitter on the web and this is certainly worth giving another try.

Lameduck

What's good about these clients is that they are most definitely not bloatware. Which is the complete opposite of tweetdeck. For tweetdeck you need first install the Adobe Air Runtime (and you cannot do that on 64 bit linux) Followed by tweetdeck itself which is about 3MB. In stark contrast, mitter is only 107Kb (that's kilo bytes not mega bytes) and gwibber is 262kb. Sure they have dependencies but those dependencies are likely to be installed by default on most systems.