Twitter Plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations tightly integrates Twitter to Maemo as an Instant Messaging (IM) protocol. After installed this plugin, you can configure multiple Twitter accounts and go online. It imports your Twitter friends and saved search queries to Contacts, and receives mentions/replies, as well as Twitter search results as conversation threads. In addition, you can send replies to any Twitter friend straight from Contacts, simply by tapping on their Twitter IDs.

1. Multiple Twitter Accounts Support

Open VoIP and IM accounts from Settings, and create a new account. You can see a Twitter icon at the bottom of the account list:

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._253gfsn2xcq_b

You can sign in with your Twitter credentials. If you want to fine tune some options, you can do it from advanced settings:

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._246g4smr4g7_b

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._247fkh29cf7_b

Most options are self-explained. Here I only want to emphasize two: "Retrieve Tweets History After Login" and "Add Url Link to Each Tweet". Unlike IM, Twitter is an asynchronized communication method. IM often means real-time synchronized communication, implying that both ends need to be online at the same time in order to start a conversation. By contrast, Twitter conversations happened asynchronously most of time. For instance, one person saw an interesting tweet from his home timeline, and replied it. Maybe one hour or one day later his friend saw this reply tweet and reply back. Eventually, their conversation is continued in such anasynchornized way. Twitter as asynchronized communication is even more evident in mobile devices. Simply due to battery limitation, mobile users can be hardly always online. Therefore, whenever a mobile user goes online, he may want to check all replies tweets that were sent to him while he was offline. "Retrieve Tweets History AfterLogin" is for this requirement. By enabling it, this plugin will save a user's state when he goes offline. It can restore the state when the user goes online next time, thus retrieving replies exactly since the last reply he received.

"Add Url Link to Each Tweet" is a workaround to the built-in Conversations app's limitation. Integration can mean more power and convenience. On the other hand, integration can also mean compromise, since the built-in Conversations app is never designed formicroblogging. For instance, you cannot favorite or RT a tweet from its UI . Adding a URL link to each tweet can give users an option to open the tweet via browser, where users can access to these extra functions.

After signed in, you can go online your Twitter accounts. The plugin will start syncing your Twitter following list to Contacts subsequently.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._254cdck7wgj_b

2. Contacts Integration

Your Twitter friends and saved search queries (with a # prefix) are imported to Contacts. The current implementation imports all your following list. This may mess up your phonebook, since a user may have thousands of Twitter contacts, but he may never call orSMS most of them in real life. In future, we will implement selective contacts importing. For now, you can just disable your Twitter accounts when not in use. All Twitter contacts will be automatically removed from Contacts, until you enable your accounts again.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._2552kgp27cb_b

You can also choose to see only contacts from a particular Twitter account from groups view (tap on the title bar of all contacts view, and choose Groups from the drop-down menu):

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._256hqtvzkc7_b

One of the greatest advantages of an integrated phonebook is that you can merge different identities (phone number, Gtalk, Skype or Twitter ID, etc) of the same person. Afterwards, you can concentrate on who to contact, rather than how to contact who. By contrast, in other mobile platforms, communication could mean opening which app to contact who in a what way.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._257cz26pxgd_b

Since this plugin integrates Twitter to Maemo platform as an IM protocol, you can IM a Twitter contact. This will open a conversation window, from which you can send a reply or mention tweet to the contact.

3. Twitter Conversation

A Twitter conversation window shows the history thread of reply/mention tweets from one of your Twitter contacts. Your Twitter ID is stripped from reply tweets. Likewise, you do not need to include your contact's Twitter ID when you reply him, the plugin will automatically add it for you. In addition, in your reply, the plugin will add the ID of your contact's last reply in the conversation to it. Therefore, others can track your conversation from Twitter website or other Twitter clients.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._260gwc243gp_b

The above conversation looks like the following in the Twitter website:

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._261gf2ffwm3_b

4. Twitter Search

The greatest thing this plugin can offer is perhaps the search feature. As mentioned above, saved search queries are imported as Twitter contacts, with their names starting with #. However, unlike reply/mention tweets, search results are not automatically retrieved from Twitter. The plugin will only start periodically retrieving results for a search query after opening a chat with the corresponding search contact. If you close the search window, the plugin will also stop receiving search results.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._258d4fhzdcq_b

You can also monitor results for multiple search queries. The plugin fully leverage the multitasking power and notification convenience of Maemo platform. Keeping up with topics you are interested couldn't be any easier in a mobile device.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._259cdw7pkc7_b

If you want to search a keyword that is not in your saved queries, you can easily do it from Conversations app. Just tap on its title bar and choose "SendIM to". Type your search query after a # and continue.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._249d9bs8qc3_b

5. Unified Messaging Inbox

All reply/mention tweets, as well as your search results, are saved in Conversations app's unified messaging inbox, together with SMS and IMs (Gtalk, Skype, MSN, etc). All types of messages are listed as history threads, grouped by contact. You simply do not need a standalone app for each type of messages.

http://docs.google.com/File?id=ah9m9..._262dk5b5jjw_b

6. Behind the Scene

This Twitter plugin is based on neaveru's libpurple-twitter-protocol, with enhancement of Twitter search and some other features. It is integrated to Maemo via telepathy-haze, a libpurple-to-telepathy bridge written by Will Thompson. The plugin is currently available in Maemo.org's Extras-devel repository. You can find instruction on how to add this repository to app manager from here.

The plugin is still under active development, so we are looking forward to any kind of feedbacks and suggestion. We will add support for DMs, home timeline, your own timeline, trends, etc in future. So stay tuned.

Know Issues:

1. You may need to reboot your N900 after installed the plugin. You will only be able to sign in afterwards.

2. If you sign in failed, just try more times. You will eventually sign in. However, this plugin may have problem with Twitter accounts that have too many following contacts (e.g. around 1000).

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Oh, we will, don't worry.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

this looks very promising i'd rather use plugins and integrate everything than launch a different app for everything, will keep an eye on this for sure

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

What about identi.ca?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

@mivoligo You can try to replace Host URL to identi.ca's in advanced account setting.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Looking nice!

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

I've put: "identi.ca" istead of "twitter.com" but with no luck.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Just wanted to say. Brilliant plugin and the only things I can think of at the moment you've already addresses as being in the works so I'l look out for those updates.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

cannot sign in twitter...

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

absolutely awesome app mate using it now...

Well recommended and my preference over using a standalone app...

It suffers from a network error issue as do telepathy-haze/telepathy-butterfly-plugin (msn)...

Any idea why mate?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Thanks indeed. As was discussed on Twitter, your plugin really goes to show how stand alone "apps" are not really required on the N900 so much, it really sheds a different light on how much integration can be done with services.

That isn't to say a stand alone variation couldn't be as successful, but it would lack the nice integration into Conversations, the Notification system which is already fairly decent. And of course, the biggest reason is that a stand alone app would need to be active, and potentially be draining that much more battery while this may be using less!

Which, is the way of the internet right? I don't recall you mentioning character counts on twitter, are you working on implementing those? Nirave is really looking forward to them! :P

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Wow. This looks awesome. I'll start testing it right away.

The direction Witter and Mauku UI and functionality have gone has frustrated me (I'm coming from the Twitter power-user app Twikini on the WinMo platform). Integrating Twitter access into the existing IM/Converations app is simply brilliant.

Congrats on releasing this, and keep up the great work!

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

An automatic URL shortening functionality will be a nice touch.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Ohh that looks nifty!

Just one question: if I want to test, is this in testing or devel? I'd like to try! :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

It's in extras-devel.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Yep. I found it! Thanks :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

looks cool, is this a c app? or python?
it would be good to see some example code written up for the various integrations, as it could help others develop similarly integrated apps.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

The plugin doesn't let me sign in after having entered my twitter credentials when configuring the plugin - just like a few others have already reported.

There are no error messages - it just says 'not signed in' when viewing all my IM accounts. I have several IM accounts configured of which some are 'enabled' and some 'disabled'. The twitter one is the only one saying 'not signed in'.

Tried several times, tried rebooting and tried reinstalling. Anyone had similar problem and managed to fix it?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

As its in devel, this will occassionally happen (same with haze&butterfly)... give it a few mins and try again...

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Great plugin! Is there a way to post from the conversations area instead of updating your availability status?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Same question - how do we just post a thought/epiphany/url/whatever rather than just do replies? (I can't get a post via setting availability status)

This is absolutely great so far. Just a few thoughts to consider:

- Advanced option: don't make contacts visible in phone book (at all). Will this be part of the 'selective contact' importing you mention?

- I believe mentioned: character count (somehow)?

- This may sound stupid, but integration with Facebook would be nice. About half my friends/work associates are on Twitter and the other half on Facebook. A similar integration would be awesome since I usually post to both simultaneously. Ideally, user can choose separate accounts (like setting up multiple Twitter accts) or adding additional sign-in to a single account that includes FB so you can post to both. I prefer the latter and many I know do this as well.

- I like the idea of a bit.ly (perhaps other) integration - not sure how that would work, but something to think about - nice challenge :-) When using bit.ly, don't forget to allow a user to plugin his/her bit.ly tracking info to so it's fully integrated.

Thanks again and this appears to be a winner for sure so will keep updated and testing.

Now, to figure out how to post w/out replying...

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

For me I'd love to be able to read tweets from the people I follow that aren't directed at me. That and the 'random thought' type tweet. Most of my crowd just tweet randomly until something catches someone's attention and then we all pile in and comment.

It's good to have my twitterers in the phone book, but an option to shiow/not show in the conversations thread would be nice so I can find the people I sms to.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Ooh, now that you mention it, I was wondering if it was the devel version or something I didn't set right. I only see tweets direct to me as well.

I agree 100% - this is very important. Directed and replies (at least in my world) are maybe 5-10% of total posts (some friends/co-workers post 30-50 random tweets a day to all followers). I also subscribe to a few groups that post many times a day: a lot of news/topics I am interested in. Was interesting that these hadn't sowed up, but they are in my contact list. These are very important must receives for me.

Cheers.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

I might be missing something, but is there a way to have direct messages included? and is there a way to send direct messages?

Otherwise, I love it!

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Hey everyone, this is my first post and I wanted to start a new thread but I'm not 100% sure how to. This may not be the correct place to say this, and It may have already been covered elsewhere, but I did a forum search, didn't see anything and decided I wanted to share it. This morning when I signed onto Meebo it told me I was connecting to FB through Jabber. Now, i've never recieved that message and I beleive it means that the XMPP client for Facebook may be up and running. If i'm correct that should mean we no longer have to use the pidgin plugin to get the N900 on facebook chat right?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Hello.

Thank you for the great plugin that we all were waiting for.

I have a few thoughts, and of course I'm kind enough to share them with you:)

- I think the N900 conversations should be used for just that, conversations. Messages directed to @someone. Home screens and other generic views should be a separate widget or something. IMO you shouldn't force it to something it's not.

- You're probably already working on this, but I'll mention it anyway. Contacts in the address book should be at least optional. For me, it just gets too messy.

- Of course direct messages support is a must.

- It would be great if the plugin could also synchronize my replies which I've written from other clients or directly from "web".

Well, can't think of anything else right now. Anyway, thanks for the great plugin, it seems very promising.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

A quick feature request if I may. Is it possible to make the plugin pick up replies that have been sent to you from people that you don't follow?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Looks good so far!

The plugin shows all of my twitter contacts as being online all of the time. Wouldn't it make more sense to show them as offline?

Is http://code.google.com/p/libpurple-t...ol/issues/list the correct place to report things like this?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Yes, you can file bugs there. The upstream developer (neaveru) and I will check. There was a very nice feedback regarding to presence status of Twitter contacts, see http://code.google.com/p/libpurple-t...s/detail?id=11

I like the idea, and I hope we could implement it soon.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

I believe it already does that :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

I guess that Facebook has not opened their XMPP interface to normal 3rd party developers yet. I hope someone could port pidgin-facebookchat to N900 :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Thanks for your input. I will add an option to not import Twitter following friends to Contacts.

DM is technically easy to support. However, I and the upstream developer are not sure about user experience yet (for instance, how to differentiate DM from replies?).

I have also thought about your 3rd advice before. Not sure if I will implement it though :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

You can enable "sync availability status message to Twitter" from account advanced setting. Then if you update your status message from availability panel, it will be updated to Twitter too.

For Inacurate & Nirave too: I am sorry about character count. It's not possible for this plugin, as I can't modify Nokia's chat UI. SMS UI has character count, but I can't use it for Twitter (since this plugin integrates Twitter as IM).

However, what I can do is to implement a text splitting method when sending a overlong tweets. So instead getting a sent failed error, this long text (>140) will be updated as two or more tweets, each one has the same reply_to_id (thus replying to the same tweet).

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

For hex900 too: Yep, I will implement home timeline the same way as search (actually the upstream develop has implemented it already, but I need to adapt it to Maemo). This means that a special Twitter buddy represented home timeline will be imported to Contacts. Open IM window for this buddy will get your home timeline. If you send a chat message to your home timeline, you simply update your Twitter status :)

This will also solves the question asked by many people: how to easily update my own Twitter status.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

The plugin is based on http://code.google.com/p/libpurple-twitter-protocol/ It's a C program. You can find all its source code there.

In short, it's a libpurple plugin that integrates to Maemo platform via Telepathy (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/).

So if you want to integrate an IM or social network service to Maemo contacts and conversations, you can either:

1. Write a libpurple plugin, and depend your package to account-plugin-haze (this will install haze plugin when installing your plugin).

2. Write a Telepathy connection manager (in N900, cellular backend, Gtalk, Skype, SIP, etc are all Telepathy connection managers). You can find Telepathy resources from the above link. BTW, you can use Python here, just like butterfly MSN plugin.

Wish these would help :)

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Because this Twitter plugin needs telepathy-haze to integrate with Maemo Contacts and Conversations...

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

Hi, sorry if this takes the conversation back into very very simple terms, but if the Twitter integration app is in the devel-resp, am I correct in thinking that its next step is to move up to the extras, then finally to a certified state?

Theres much talk on here of needing other plugins, when an 'app' is finalised, do these plug ins become integrated into the download, or do they still need to be installed separately?

And if so, for novices who aren't familiar with linux/xterm ect, is it better to wait for that point rather then install a bunch of unfamiliar files separately, and then not be able to trace the cause of any potential errors?

Apologies again if this is off topic or something I should know already, a quick explanation would be appreciated if someone has the time.

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

i seem to have the "not signed in" issue too. the plugin seemed to install just fine but when i try sign in it looks like it tries for a second then goes back to not signed in.

i know the app is still in devel but has anyone got around the issue?

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

They already have!

Re: Twitter plugin for N900 Contacts and Conversations
 

That will make it almost the perfect twitter app for me. Right now I'm alternating between mauku and witter - and neither is exactly right.