How To Add Twitter To Pidgin

Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by in Internet Tools, Software

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pidgin-logoPidgin is a multi-platform and protocol chat client that supports more than 15 protocols. You can chat with your Yahoo, MSN, Google and AIM friends all at the same time, saving you time and system resources, as you won’t need to install different applications for different protocols.

Twitter, as you may already know, is a microblogging service that is quite popular and has made huge strides in web 2.0. Twitter used to have their own chat bot that you could add to your messenger and post and receive messages from Twitter.  However, they had to bring it down, as they were facing huge loads and outages on their servers.

Today, I will tell you how you can add one such bot to your Pidgin messenger. This works for both Windows and Linux.

The Process

  1. Download a little addon called microblog-purple from Google Code. You may choose a package for your operating system.
  2. In case of Windows, install the exe file directly.  In case of Linux, either download the deb or rpm package and install accordingly or install from the terminal for which you can find instructions here.
  3. Restart Pidgin and Add a Twitter account by going to Accounts > Manage Accounts from the top toolbar. Enter your twitter credentials and click save.
  4. Voila! You have a Twitter bot ready!
Pidgin

Useful Commands

To send a tweet, just type in and press enter.

To see the replies, send the command /replies

To look for new tweets (although it auto-refreshes), send the command /refresh

You can add various other plugin to Pidgin. Matt tells us how we can add Facebook chat to pidgin and here is a tool for adding your skype friends!

Happy Twittering!

My Name is Keshav Khera and I am the Editor at Fabworker. I am currently 14 years old and live in India.  I love making friends, you can find me on twitter and facebook.

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  • http://FriendFeed.com/innomen Brandon M. Sergent

    Miranda with a few plugins is infinitely better. Far more customizable. Far more stable, in part because it’s far less common which means a low priority target for the intentional breaking that yahoo icq and others like to get up to, and in part because it’s better written.

    If you’re going to make the switch from some other chat to an open source one, you’re going to get a learning curve no matter what you do. I strongly suggest you go with miranda from the outset because as you advance you’ll want more and more, and with pidgin all your find is walls, where as with miranda you’ll find doors. Some may not be easily opened, but at least they can be opened.

  • anonymous

    Yeah, Brandon, because everyone uses Windows.

  • http://friendfeed.com/innomen Brandon M. Sergent

    No, only 88.12% of them.

    http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

    Pardon me for living in the real world.