You've been hearing a lot about it in the news, and you're only going to hear more and more. If your business isn't looking into twitter, you're missing a boat thats growing massively - http://xlnk.me/16.

There are ways you can take advantage of twitter, the great thing about twitter is that you dont have to have a long spiel about what you've been doing. This, and other "blogs" i've done do take time, and a real concerted effort to do. Twitter "tweets" are a lot more casual.

Anyway, I've been experimenting a bit, and every post I make here automatically updates my twitter as well - http://xlnk.me/14, but I hadn't found a way to nicely see what others had "tweeted" without firing up a web browser, visiting the homepage, and clicking refresh - until today.

I've downloaded and installed Microblog Purple - http://xlnk.me/13 - which lets you embed a twitter follow in an chat window, just like other chats.

As I use Ubuntu exclusively as my operating environment, it was just a matter of adding a repository, apt-get and away it goes. Ubuntu rules.

As this is Pidgin based, there are a couple of nice things:

• I can have multiple twitter accounts active at once
• When receives an update (as just happened), Pidgin puts a status message in the top right corner of the screen over everything else, even if the chat/monitor windows are minimised.

This seems a pretty good solution at the moment, the only thing that would be nicer is if I could have the same facility in IRC chat instead, which I tend to use a little more than Pidgin.

There are some python scripts to do updates from xchat - http://www.xlnk.me/15 - but nothing that does quite what I want, which would be sort of a virtual channel for each account, that follows the updates from twitter and posts them to the channel as they happen.

Maybe i'm looking at it wrong, and should try and get Pidgin to behave a little more like xchat. Something for later ;-)