I have covered Gwibber, which wis the Ubuntu default social networking tool. This time around I will focus on Pino. Pino is the default social tool for Fedora 13. And although it is very much in beta (whereas Gwibber is not), I find it to be far more stable than it’s competition. I will say, however, that Pino is limited to what it can connect to. It is best (in its current state) that you consider Pino a Twitter app and nothing more. That being said, let’s take a look at Fedora’s default social tool.

Installation

As I said, this is the default tool for Fedora, so there is no need for installation. If, however, you are looking for a Facebook social tool, you can either wait and hope the developers add Facebook to this tool or you can go ahead and install Gwibber (though when you see the list of requirements, you might change your mind).

Usage

Figure 1

You will find Pino located in the Applications > Internet menu. When you first fire up Pino you will have to add an account. This is simple. All you need to do is add your login/password credentials, select the Service you are adding (by default there is only Twitter, identi.ca, and Other), and click OK. This is wher eyou find the limitation of Pino. I have confidence that Facebook and other sites will be added in the future.

Figure 2

Once you have added your account you will be amazed at how quickly the main windo (see Figure 2) fills up with your “tweets”. That is where Pino really shines – it’s speed. Pino refreshes remarkably fast.

From this main window you can also view:

Home timeline: This will display all tweets from you and those you are following.

Mentions: Anyone that has mentioned you in a tweet.

Messages: All of your direct messages.

User information: Click on a user’s icon and their information will appear.

Preferences

Figure 3

If you are like me you use your Twitter account quite a bit. To that end I always like to make sure my app is running. With Pino you can have it start automatically to the notification are and have it live in your notification area whenever it is minimized. To do this click Edit > Preferences and then click on the Desktop tab (see Figure 3).  By default Pino is set to minimize to the tray, but not to auto start. Check the box for Starting up in tray and then click Close.

Now you will need to have Pino start at login. You can not do this through Pino itself, but through System > Preferences > Startup Applications.

Figure 4

When Pino is minimized to the notification area you will see the icon shown in Figure 4. I’m sure you can guess, the icon is the small Pine tree.

Survey says!

Pino is an outstanding app for Twitter status updates. It’s not nearly as feature-rich as Gwibber, but it won’t gobble up your CPU like Gwibber is prone to. If you are looking for a tool to post twitter status updates, and you use Fedora – look no further than Pino.

Installing Gwibber

It shouldn’t matter what distribution you are using. Open up your Add/Remove Software utility (in GNOME this is found at the bottom of the Applications menu), do a search for “gwibber” (no quotes), select the results, and click apply to install. Or if you’d rather install via command line you can issue a command similar to one of these:

sudo apt-get install gwibber

or

yum install gwibber

Once Gwibber is installed you are ready to fire it up.

Adding accounts

Figure 1

The first thing you will need to do is add an account to Gwibber. This is a fairly intuitive process. Click on the Accounts menu and select Create. When the Create submenu expands you will see all of the different types of accounts you can use with Gwibber.

Let’s add a Twitter account to Gwibber (would you be “Gwibbing” instead of “Tweeting”?)  Select Twitter from the listing which will open up a small window (see Figure 1). There is very little information you need to add:

• Username – Your Twitter user name.
• Password – Your Twitter password.
• Receive messages – Do you want Gwibber to show your incoming messages?
• Sending messages – Do you want Gwibber to be able to send messages to your account.

Once you fill in the information click OK. At first you may think nothing is happening. Give Gwibber time before you assume something is wrong because it takes a bit of time for the authentication to happen.

Most of the accounts, you will find, as as simple as this to set up. The only account that might trip you up is Facebook

Posting to Facebook

Figure 2

In order to post to facebook you will  have to authorize Facebook to use Gwibber for posting. To do this you have to get an authorization key from Facebook. Make sure you are logged into your Facebook account before you request the key. Select Facebook from the Create submenu which will open up a similar window to the one you used to configure your Twitter account. The primary difference is there is no username/password to add. Instead you have to authorize Gwibber for your Facebook account. Click the Authorize Gwibber button which will open up a new window (see Figure 2). Click on the Request Login Code which will open up your browser to a page with a key on it. Enter that key in the text area of the Facebook Authorization window and click Apply.  Now click on the Authorize Satus Changes button and you will then be taken back to Facebook where you will authorize Gwibber to post to your account. It’s a sort of back and forth that might sound complicated, but it’s very simple. And once you are done there is nothing more to take care of besides the posting.

Final thoughts

Gwibber is a great way to post to multiple microblogging accounts. The only drawback is you will be posting the same thing to all of your accounts.