The Twitter Adium Saga Continues ¬

2007-01-31

Update: Please don’t follow any instructions in this article as the APIs have changed somewhat. It’s still worth a read, but make changes as directed in the updated post instead.

So, with Adium’s recent explanation as to why version 1.0 has been under development for so long, and their stating that, “it’s almost ready. 1.0 is almost done,” I figured the beta is probably stable enough for me to test.

I backed up my current Adium application and settings:

<notextile>mv ~/Applications/Adium.app ~/Applications/Adium\ 0.89.1.app</notextile>
<notextile>tar -czpf adium_backup-2007-01-31.tar.gz ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0 ~/Library/Preferences/com.adiumX.adiumX.plist</notextile>

...and proceeded to install the latest beta. The upgrade was smooth and my settings & chat transcripts were preserved, so I was up and running very quickly.

However, as you may remember, my goal for using the Twitter service was to unify my status updates. Post once, display everywhere. And I was going to do this using the TwitterAdium Adium Xtra, which only works with the 1.0 branch of Adium.

Installing TwitterAdium was a breeze as well, thanks to Adium’s built-in Xtras installation capabilities (one click from the web). However, the configuration of <notextile>~/.twitter</notextile> does not work as described. There are three lines which you have to fill in in said file:

userid: XXXX
<notextile>email: blabla.com password: secret@

What is not explained is that userid is not your Twitter “username”, but a unique number. The easiest way to find this is to hover over the link to your Twitter status RSS feed. For example, my RSS feed link is:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/39063.rss

So, my userid is actually 39063, not “morgant”. Once my <notextile>~/.twitter</notextile> file had the correct data in it, TwitterAdium worked as advertised.

I set my status in Adium to <notextile>%_Twitter</notextile> (or, occasionally, I mix and match with other Xtras), then just send my status updates via AIM to twitterim. If only someone would update the Quicksilver Adium Plug-in...

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  1. Thanks for the tips…I can update my Twitter, and have set my away message’s title and message body to ”%_Twitter”, but cannot get Adium to reply properly. Any ideas?

    hibiscusroto

    6277 days ago

  2. I don’t believe it’s necessary to set the title of the status (either available or away) to “%_Twitter”, but I don’t think that should have any adverse side-effects.

    I have found that as Twitter’s not 100% reliable (although it’s gotten much better since I started using it) that sometimes it can cause Adium to hang at launch if trying to log in and set the status to that of Twitter (esp. with many accounts). I’ve also found that if you have your status is set to auto-respond that it often takes a good 30 seconds for TwitterAdium to actually respond and probably doesn’t at all if Twitter is too slow in handling requests.

    Does that answer any of your questions?

    Morgan Aldridge

    6276 days ago

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