How Twitter became IRC (for me)

While Stefano may think Twitter isn’t IRC, I disagree. In fact, I’ve recently found what I believe to be the best IM/IRC/Twitter solution. At least for me. The magic ingredients are:

• Moodblast
• bitlbee
• Tweet.im
• and IRC client

If it weren’t for Moodblast I wouldn’t use Twitter at all. Moodblast makes it trivially easy for me to update my Twitter, Facebook, GTalk, and Skype status all at once. I have it hotkeyed to Cmd-F12.

But Moodblast only helps with posting tweets, not reading them. Despite trying Twirl, TweetDeck, RSS feeds and, of course, the Twitter website itself, the only Twitter app I’ve found myself actually using is Twitterific for the iPhone. Even then, I don’t use it very often, only when I happen to have some time waiting for someone or something. To use Twitter at all, I needed a solution that fit into my existing tools..

At first I looked for a Twitter to IM solution, but everything I first read suggested this was broken. Then Matt pointed me to Tweet.im which worked as advertised and I quickly ended up with a Twitter contact in Adium. However, I found that Twitter is not the same as IM. When someone IM’s me, I want to know about it. I don’t want to notified about every tweet.

Unhappy with the Twitter-IM solution, I turned to IRC, another network I wanted to pay more attention to. Previously I had been more active on IRC, but I found I didn’t like having an IRC, IM and Skype app always running, not to mention a Twitter app on top. However, if I could find a way to combine all into one app, I would be happy. Well, all by Skype which doesn’t play well with others.

Enter bitlbee, an IM-IRC gateway. Essentially, bitlbee runs your own personal IRC server for your IM accounts. You interact with your IM buddies just as you would private messages on a normal IRC channel. This is perfect.

I tried a day of using rcirc before switching back to the excellent Colloquy IRC client. Now I have my GTalk, IRC and Twitter communication all in one convenient app. Tweets come into an IRC channel and I can quickly browse them and respond via IRC or Moodblast.