Gwibber: Linux Microblogging Client Saves Time While You Waste Time
by Kristin Shoemaker - Feb. 25, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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There are some phrases that come up repeatedly, especially in one's professional life: It's all about who you know. I need to put in some face time. Focus on developing your networking skills.
Traditionally these sorts of things were said in relation to attending conferences and conventions -- live and in-person. Now, however, it's more common to meet and collaborate with others online. Meet the social networking services, which, as the name implies, are as much social as work related. Just like face-to-face conventions, social networks unite people to collaborate on and discuss ideas, and, at least occasionally, goof off.
Whether you're using your social networking time for honest to goodness work, or as a diversion cleverly disguised as work, it's good to use it effectively. You'll end up getting your work done faster, or at least pack as much playtime into your day as possible.
Using this time effectively (for whatever reason) is difficult due to the sheer number of networking services. Linux users have a native gem for keeping on top of it all -- Gwibber.
Gwibber can post and receive messages from multiple social networking services, including Twitter, the open source Twitter variant, Identi.ca, Laconi.ca, Digg, Pidgin, Facebook, Flickr, Ping.fm, Jaiku and RSS/Atom feeds. It comes packaged for a number of distributions, including Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora. While Gwibber doesn't yet deliver every last feature that every social network it connects to provides, it's a great way to keep up with reading and posting across networks with relatively little effort.
Gwibber's account set up and management is straightforward (though in Flickr's case, your username is the name on your Flickr user profile, not your Yahoo! ID). Gwibber comes with a few default themes that feature some individual customization options (different social networks can be assigned different colored banners for their updates), and while additional themes are available, they're not located in one central repository.
I have had a few issues with Gwibber crashing at log in on my Intrepid/GNOME desktop. Generally, when this occurs, starting Gwibber manually works without further problems. Despite the intermittent crashing, I've found I prefer Gwibber over the other microblogging/social networking clients (native or otherwise) that I've tried on Linux. Gwibber can be easily summoned into focus on the desktop (compared to the KDE4 KDETwitter widget), but does a great job staying out of the way (compared to clients like TwitterFox).
Gwibber makes staying in touch (for work, or other reasons) easier. It is a time saver, but it also spares me a lot of frustration. An easy to use, stable, all-in-one, at-a-glance application for keeping tabs on my friends, family, and colleagues -- and it's open source? I can't really go wrong there.
