[Adium-devl] Toward 1.3

[Colin Barrett]

On May 9, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Zachary West wrote:

> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net> wrote:
>> Actually we /already/ have Twitter integration that is better than
>> using the web API -- XMPP.
>
> I disagree. I plan on (probably this weekend) creating a Twitter
> account service which places your friends on your contact list with
> their status as their recent tweets. This combined with a recent
> status window would work perfectly. Messages to the user would be
> direct messages. Then Adium-using Tweeters could potentially hold
> conversations over the medium as well.

Gah gah gah gah nooooooo. I totally disagree, as someone who uses  
Twitter a lot. I think that would just piss off a lot of people. Here  
a couple reasons why you shouldn't have Twitter in the contact list:

  - You follow many more people than you could care about seeing all  
at once. For example, I'm following ~200 people.
  - More people follow you than you could care about seeing all at  
once, including people who you don't know. A little less than 500  
people follow me, for example.
  - You can't organize Twitter contacts into groups. (yet?)
  - You can only direct message people who are following you (spam  
prevention measure), so you can't just IM anyone you follow).
  - Twitter's about microblogging, not really about status or presence  
or anything like this. If I have a random thought or complaint, I'll  
post that to Twitter. People can reply to that, talk about their own  
stuff, etc. The right way to show the information coming from Twitter  
is a river-of-news style timeline. That's how it's presented on the  
website and in every Twitter client.

I would vastly prefer the bookmarked chat option, but I really don't  
even see the point of that. Here are some technical reasons why we  
should just stick with the XMPP API:

  - The web API is slower (you have to poll, while XMPP is push)
  - It doesn't allow you to do some things (for example, if you want  
use the "track" feature, you have to use IM or get SMS notifications).
  - You can do anything you could do from the web API via the XMPP api  
using commands -- e.g. if I want to follow gruber, I would enter:  
"follow gruber". To direct message Elliott, I'd do: "d eharris You up  
for in-n-out?"

Really, all that's needed is to get a character counter into the  
message window when you're IMing twitter at twitter.com on an XMPP  
account. TRUST ME. Currently I have this on the right side of the  
input field. I just need to finish and commit. I have a half finished  
mockup that I'll send later later today -- it looks pretty.

-Colin