Adium to Integrate Twitter by IM
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.
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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I use Adium, and this looks pretty sexy, but I don't know if it will wean me off Tweetdeck. Groups and searches are important.
Yes sir, agreed. Imagine, though, getting just a particular group by IM :) now that's fun to think about.
Sounds great! I'm a fan of both Twitter and Adium so this is perfect. I'm really interested in seeing how well it determines whether somebody is online or not. I usually just check the last 5 minutes of Tweets for that. Now if it provided a home window like Twhirl I'd be all set.
Scott - that's a great point! I do check Twitter update timestamps manually sometimes for presence info - it would rock if Adium incorporated this as well! Like a little green light if they've Tweeted in last 10 mins? Oh the wonders of Twitter never cease!
Or maybe even a setting to adjust how many minutes from the last tweet to deem somebody active. I'd love to have a group of just my "online" Twitter follows to view at a glance. If I see somebody I'm particularly interested in hearing from I can just load up Twitter.com or double click their name to see what they said.
This looks like it might be interesting, but I'm wondering how well it will handle a set of 1000+ followed in terms of performance and management UI. If it's just another group of handles like my other IM services, it'll be pretty overwhelming
My thought exactly l.m.orchard. I'm hoping for a way to designate how long ago somebody needs to have posted to be considered online. Otherwise I'd like everybody else to be in my offline group.
thanks
I use adium religiously for social media marketing. I remember when they allowed myspace then facebook and I was super excited now that we can integrate twitter it just doesnt seem fair to the social engines anymore lol.
The plan was announced good,