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.

Commenter reactive pointed out ping.fm, a website which in fact I use. ping.fm allows you to update one site, through a variety of means, which will then pass those updates on to 32 other websites.

ping.fm amazingly allows updates to be textual or graphical (you can set ping.fm to upload images to Flickr etc.). The ability to send videos is going to be launched soon.

The site will ‘ping’ most major social networking sites updates: Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us and Jaiku. Smaller ones like Kwippy are also supported.

Updates can be sent through instant messaging (GTalk, MSN, Yahoo! or AIM), unlike Twitter at the moment, from iGoogle, Facebook, an iPhone, WAP or SpinVox (a service which allows a voice to be converted to text on a phone). This is in addition to email (and therefore MMS, and on some carriers SMS) and the web.

With ping.fm it’s just as quick to update all your social networks as it is one. It is only one way however, and other peoples’ updates will not be received using it. Another similar service, which is a little more complex is imified.