With Ubuntu you can link to a package or application for a user to install from their trusted repository. Give it a shot and install the awesome Droid font, Pidgin, nautilus-open-terminal, or all at the same time.

Twitter doesn’t support links from theses protocols, but almost all links on Twitter use URL shortening services like bit.ly or TinyURL. Right now you can use TinyURL to link to unsupported protocols on Twitter. Like I did here.

I can see that Twitter might want to protect users from these unfamiliar links. I don’t think this is making the service any more secure though, since anyone trying an exploit can easily use a redirect as I did.

It would be nice if there was a PPA on Launchpad that offered this, but I don’t have the time to do that, so I just grabbed the source from SVN and did a checkinstall on it for my 64-bit system. Heres the package:

libpurple-twitter-protocol_0.20-1_amd64.deb (70 kB)

Moving Along

People on Twitter move quick, so it baffles me why the official site has no way to mark tweets as read to have them removed from your timeline. Similar to how GMail (and other e-mail applications) let you mark e-mails as read so they don’t appear in your inbox.

Multiple Accounts

I manage Twitter accounts for various web sites, as well as my own personal twitter. This means I have to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time. Doing this with Thwirl was very simple, as the application supports multiple accounts much like Pidgin does with Instant Messaging.

Tweet Management

It’s easy to get flustered when you miss a lot of tweets with the stock web interface. Thwirl has a nice little trash icon that lets you mark all the tweets as seen, so you can focus on the tweets you haven’t read and ignore the ones you have already seen.

Notifications

For sites that have a high volume of tweets, Thwirls notification system is great. It’s easy to get notified about things I want, or disable notifications for a specific site. Sometimes I can’t be bothered with tweets, and it’s nice that Thwirl lets me turn off notifications globally at the click of a button.

Hammer Protection

Thwirl seems to do a great job of not hammering Twitter API servers, and even gives you a little bit of information about how many requests it’s making and the limiting metrics. This is good because rate limiting can be IP-based with the Twitter API, and when you’re accessing multiple accounts you have to be resourceful. I’ve stayed connected to 3+ Twitter accounts with a decent volume of tweets without any problems.

One downer is that I don’t think Adobe AIR applications run on Linux, so Thwirl won’t run on my Ubuntu. You can also run Adobe AIR applications in Ubuntu, but @rfkrocktk tells me it’s got some funk with 64-bit, and that  OMG! Ubuntu! article helps. Flash and 64-bit combined can get ugly for proprietary software it appears.

Tweet @KristopherIves if you have anything to add, questions, or comments and feel free to leave a comment below.

Edit: I had a chance to actually install Thwirl in 64-bit Ubuntu, and it does work quite nicely, but the installation process was a nightmare. Essentially you have to:

• Download the AIR installer .bin from Adobe, which is a 32-bit application
• Install a helper tool called getlibs that makes it easy to wrap 32-bit libraries
• Wrap some 32-bit libraries (listed in the OMG! Ubuntu! article)
• Run the Thwirl .air installer

Other than that it worked as expected on my 64-bit 9.10 Ubuntu (Karmic) updated as of January 16, 2010. It even added a nice icon to my desktop, but oddly the icon in the notification area is of lower quality. Thwirl also updated to 0.94 automatically, so I believe the update also works.