What are you doing?
Microblogging is now much more (well, for some) than just answering the above question, but some people do want to publish what they’re doing at the moment. If they also use an IM client (and who isn’t?), it makes sense to make the IM status message and “what I’m doing” tweets the same.
As my technology of choice when it comes to IM is Telepathy, I started thinking about creating a connection manager (essentially, a protocol support driver) for Twitter, but then it dawned to me there’s much simpler and better way to do it, if you just want to retweet the status messages.
My preferred Twitter client is gwibber, written in Python, and it was very easy to extend it to listen to presence status change messages from Telepathy’s Mission Control and repost them to the configured microblogging services. Together with Davyd‘s work on improved status message widget for Empathy, I think this is going to be useful for people changing their presence often (and not using canned statuses).
To keep the requirements to the minimum (and since it’s a very simple client), I’ve used dbus-python directly, and also wrapped the whole thing so that patched gwibber continues to run even if there’s no dbus-python available. The big ugly chunk of the change in the diff is preferences.glade, where for some reason glade reindented a whole lot of lines that I never touched (another table row with a single checkbox is the only UI change).
The code is in bzr branch in Launchpad. Go, grab it and play with it! Keep in mind it’s fresh and not thoroughly tested. Also beware, ye rhythmbox (or other music player) users that update your IM status with every new song – this will spam your microblog if you let it :)
Does this mean I think Empathy should become microblogging client? Absolutely not. There’s more to microblogging than sharing statuses, and existing clients (e.g. gwibber) already do it very well. This patch is just a way to integrate previously disconnected parts of your digital life (ie. IM and microblogging). To publish your status (both on IM and Twitter), use Empathy. To microblog, use gwibber.
