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Tech Tip: Using Twitter and Facebook from Pidgin

Dec 08, 2009  By Scott Morris

In the vast world of communication, instant messaging is a long-standing medium. Facebook has entered the scene relatively recently, as has Twitter. If you use these newer mediums of communication and you're a Pidgin user then you may want to look at the Pidgin plugins for accessing them.

Pidgin is an an Instant Messaging client that has plugins and capabilities to connect to you to all of your favorite messaging protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ, Google Talk, etc..), and in addition there are third-party plugins for Facebook and Twitter. The integration is magnificent, I was like a kid on Christmas morning when I found this out and started using it.

You can find the Twitter plugin here.

twitter

The Facebook plugin can be found here.

twitter

Look for the "install" link on the right hand side of the page and follow the instructions, in no time you'll be using Pidgin to do two more IM functions.

Find more Pidgin plugins on the third party plugin page.

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Pro Tip: Don't use failbook!

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 01/16/2010 - 08:50.

It's evil and stupid.

Symptom when Facebook plug-in requires updating

Mark Stinson 's picture
Submitted by Mark Stinson (not verified) on Sat, 12/26/2009 - 14:32.

I've found when using the Facebook plug-in, when a captcha window appears due to failed login:
1. The entered password doesn't match (typoed, changed, etc)
2. Check the Facebook plugin page for a few days for the update. It doesn't self update. (There are there no official scripts to check, download and replace it so I wrote my own for cron.)

Later. Mark S.

Thanks!

ProfBib's picture
Submitted by ProfBib on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 16:02.

Scott,

Thanks for this tip. I have mused about the possibility of this before, but never bothered (or remembered) to poke around for any existing plugins.

Best,
Evan

also

leif's picture
Submitted by leif (not verified) on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 12:43.

Forgot to mention that if you can do win32 development, grab the source tarball or the svn and have a go and fixing the DST issue! There's only a couple of developers, so any help is appreciated.

@ak_hepcat

twitter plugin

leif's picture
Submitted by leif (not verified) on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 12:41.

There are some outstanding bugs with the current release, but none of them are "critical path", such as on windows, the DST timezone offset is not correctly managed, so times may be an hour different than expected. Still working on a clean fix for that. It is resolved for Linux, though, as of 0.2.3.

you won't see twitters "retweets" because they're a separate API than the standard timeline.

Also, you can't subscribe to lists via pidgin, so you'll only see your public timeline and those tweets from your followed friends.

You can't DM from the twitter plugin, nor can you see your DMs. You can see your '@' replies, by using the built-in
"/replies" command, ala IRC commands