Popular Mac multi-service IM software Adium will include sophisticated support for Twitter in its next version, Adium has announced on its blog. Instant messaging access has been shut off for months and isn't coming back any time soon, the company confirmed in October, but Adium has built its own system.
Adium's Zac West posted screenshots to the official blog and the implementation looks great. The plan was announced this weekend but just now noticed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
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The gist of the plan is that all your Twitter friends will be added as Adium contacts, messaging them individually will send a "direct message" via Twitter and the bulk of people you are following will have their messages delivered in a group chat. Each individual Tweet will be followed by a link to reply and the frequency of updates will be customizable.
Many people will want to track certain search terms of tags on Twitter in Adium and West says he's hoping that will be possible soon. He has also said that drag and drop upload of images to Twitpic is another goal.
We hope that the controls on new message receipts will be granular enough that Twitter by Adium won't be annoying for heavy Twitter users. We presume that having all your Twitter friends as contacts will make it easy to create groups in Adium as well. Groups in Twitter is one of the keys to effective use of the service.
We hate to keep writing about Twitter here, but we do use the service all day long and there's a reason that so many developers are focused on it. You can follow me on Twitter at Marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb crew at ReadWriteWeb. Thanks to Chris Messina for catching this news and bringing it to our attention on Twitter.
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