Twitter IRC
Sean B. Palmer
and the fact that you can't skim it easily. Perhaps it would be less
annoying if there were a proper IRC interface for it. And by IRC
interface, I don't mean a bot which posts tweets and delivers the
occasional update to you. I mean an IRC server that is completely a
Twitter interface.
What I imagine is that you can join a #channel and that will be the
Twitter list called "channel" which corresponds to it. On that channel
you'd see the usernames of all the people who are in that list of
course.
This gets a bit tricky around the edges. Sending private messages has
an obvious interface, but I'm not sure about sending regular messages.
Perhaps all channels should be +m except for #, which is the channel
you send all your messages to. This doesn't sound like the sort of
thing that I would enjoy programming. I did have a quick look around
to see if somebody had made anything like this, but it doesn't seem
that they have.
Sean B. Palmer
(1) One of the reasons that I thought about an immersive Twitter IRC
interface is that Noah Slater saw a quadruple rainbow in York today
and had used Twitter to find a photograph of it:
* http://twitter.com/carlhardcastle/statuses/10476736732
* http://img690.yfrog.com/i/yz9.jpg/
Of course, search would be one of the things that an immersive Twitter
IRC interface would be worst at, and yet this is one of the very few
times I've seen somebody actually using Twitter well and it requires
search.
(2) I forgot the name of the functionality where you can filter
certain users, what they turn out to call lists, so I signed in to
Twitter to check. When I did so, it got me to update my profile
details using a popup. One of the fields was my country, and this time
there was no sign that the input would be truncated!
One of the very first things that annoyed me about Twitter was that it
truncated the name of my country to "United Kingdom of Great Britai".
So this time I typed in the full "United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland" and... Yeah, they still truncate it.
Noah Slater
On 15 Mar 2010, at 14:38, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> Twitter is kind of annoying because of the low signal to noise ratio
> and the fact that you can't skim it easily. Perhaps it would be less
> annoying if there were a proper IRC interface for it. And by IRC
> interface, I don't mean a bot which posts tweets and delivers the
> occasional update to you. I mean an IRC server that is completely a
> Twitter interface.
I found three such things from a quick search:
tircd
http://code.google.com/p/tircd/
"tircd presents twitter as an irc channel. You can connect to tircd with any irc client, and twitter as if you were on irc"
Seems to have integrated most of the IRC features pretty sensibly, such as being able to /invite users to your main channel to start following them. The search interface sounds a little odd, but I guess it might work. Basically, you join an arbitrary channel (essentially a named search) and set the topic to your search terms, and then the users and messages happen automatically from that point.
twircd
"TwIRCd proxies Twitter through an IRC server, so that you can read, search and update Twitter using your IRC client. It is written for PHP 5.3 using an extensible architecture and does not require anything but the PHP socket extension."
The integration of IRC and Twitter functionality seems identical, which might be a sign it makes some amount of sense.
twig
http://github.com/ghewgill/twig
"Twig is an IRC server that reads from the Twitter Streaming API and forwards new tweets to an IRC channel. It is designed to be used by a single user only."
Scant documentation, but looks similar in functionality.
Non of these servers mention the (relatively new) list feature, and I've not used any of them.
gerikson
> On 15 Mar 2010, at 14:38, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>
> > Twitter is kind of annoying because of the low signal to noise ratio
> > and the fact that you can't skim it easily. Perhaps it would be less
> > annoying if there were a proper IRC interface for it. And by IRC
> > interface, I don't mean a bot which posts tweets and delivers the
> > occasional update to you. I mean an IRC server that is completely a
> > Twitter interface.
>
> I found three such things from a quick search:
>
> tircd
>
> http://code.google.com/p/tircd/
>
> "tircd presents twitter as an irc channel. You can connect to tircd with any irc client, and twitter as if you were on irc"
>
I'm using tircd and I'm very happy with it. A minor annoyance is that
the latest update won't post any tweets containing unicode characters,
but that may be an issue with my terminal unicode setup.
You start following a user by using /invite, and you unfollow them
using /kick, very satisfying!
> Seems to have integrated most of the IRC features pretty sensibly, such as being able to /invite users to your main channel to start following them. The search interface sounds a little odd, but I guess it might work. Basically, you join an arbitrary channel (essentially a named search) and set the topic to your search terms, and then the users and messages happen automatically from that point.
>
I haven't used any of the search functions, maybe I should try!
/g.