It’s quite funny to see that, as I finally got some time to finish my first post on Twitter OS X desktop clients yesterday, a new one appeared the same day in the shape of Twitter support in Adium 1.4 beta 1. Well, to be fair, there already was support for Twitter in Adium but it wasn’t as widely available as a public beta. Here are some thoughts about Adium as a Twitter desktop client for OS X that I gathered as I used Adium exclusively for Twitter access yesterday.

First impression

First, there are some details on how this would work on Adium’s blog. Great read on the overall philosophy of the Twitter integration.

Not surprisingly, Adium tries to fit Twitter support into a chat metaphor. People you follow are automatically added to a new Twitter contact group, which is thanksfully collapsed by default! A new section called “Bookmarks” is also added (I’m actually not sure if that existed in previous versions of Adium and I just missed it) which contains a “Timeline (name of account)” bookmark for each Twitter account you set up. This actually didn’t work the first time I tried, which was quite disconcerting. According to Adium’s developpers, this is a bug that will be addressed with an upcoming second beta. At this point, restarting Adium should do the trick.

Timelines are actually group chats in which people you follow are participants of sorts. This is the core of Adium’s support for Twitter. Any time someone you follow posts a public tweet, it appears in the group chat window (modulo refresh period, of course). Noteworthy is the fact Adium lets you select a different appearance for group chat vs. regular, one-to-one chat, which is quite useful. An example of such a styled timeline can be seen below.

Direct messages are implemented as one-to-one chats as would be expected.

Limitations

The model of Twitter as group chat has limits though. First, there is no way, that I could find at least, to have persistent search results, i.e. an updated list of all the mentions of given terms. Just like timelines for your Twitter accounts are implemented as bookmarks in your contact list, I can envision persistent searches being implemented as a different kind of timeline.

Another issue is the fact that it’s not as easy to follow conversations as it is with dedicated clients. I assume the appearance extra that you use could help but, just as Adium adds links to the right of each post to operate on them (re-tweet, reply, favorite, permalink or, in the case of one of your posts, delete), a link to open a conversation in a separate window (similar to what Tweetie for Mac does) would be helpful. Obviously, it could become confusing with direct message conversations, since that’s how they are implemented as well…

The biggest issue at this point, though, is the fact that you only get tweets that were published while you are connected. It seems, because I just discovered this as I was writing and haven’t had time to explore more, that historical tweets that occurred while you were not connected are accessible from the so-called chat transcripts where it’s difficult to quickly see which tweets you’ve read and which you haven’t. Similarly, your timeline is reset each time you restart Adium, making it difficult to follow things as some tweets will be in your current timeline while others are hidden in logs…

Conclusion, for now at least?

Adium’s implementation of Twitter support is based around the group chat metaphor. It has potential but also some serious drawbacks at this time, ones that will make me go back to a dedicated Twitter client, at least for now. Of course, the software is still in beta and might still evolve, though I don’t know that it’s not already feature-frozen. A pretty cool feature, though one not directly related to Twitter support, is support for laconi.ca servers, as well as IRC support. What this means is that I could potentially use Adium for most of my communication needs (IM, Twitter and IRC) and that’s a big plus for me. IRC support is good enough that I can use Adium instead of Colloquy for my very simple IRC needs. All that’s missing to make Adium my one-stop communication hub is better Twitter support and Skype support (there’s an Adium extra to support Skype but I haven’t managed to make it work)… I suspect this is a big upside for lots of people and a big advantage over other desktop clients. I will therefore follow with interest how Twitter support in Adium evolves and might report back from time to time…