Note: Thanks to segphault (at) gwibber I can revise my whole post and and say that gwibber is my client of choice. Check the comments for his response to find out how to use the client properly.

So as some of you already know I’m a strong advocate of Ubuntu as a desktop environment.

With the release of 10.04 they have now included a new social media client called Gwibber. My first foray into using it was rather unsuccessful but i recent have revised my opinion.

By default its a rather bland and unimaginative to look at but it does handle a large number of social networks as it stands it currently covers

  • Flickr
  • Twitter
  • StatusNet
  • Qaiku
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Digg
  • Identi.ca


It contains a number of useful features such as

  • Multiple streams
  • Auto URL shortening
  • Unified feeds
  • Saved Searches
  • HTML Themes
  • Spell checking

If your willing to spend the time you can also customise the interface through its themeing component.

All this is nice except I never used the client… Why? I hear you ask.

Well the biggest problem is that there is no advanced configuration. In my case I tend to monitor a few different people/tags depending on my mood at the time. Gwibber then adds a handy icon onto its toolbar for you so that you don’t have to go searching for it. BUT, there is no way to remove the icon when you have finished following that person/tag. which got really annoying after 30 icons endedup on the toolbar.

So I put gwibber on the shelf and went back to my default web clients.

I recently revisited Gwibber thinking to see if it has had any updates since I last looked to improve this aspect of the functionality. Sadly not. However i decided to have a good nose around and found the most useful file.

~/.local/share/desktop-couch/couchdb.html

This simple little html file allows you to access the couchDb set up that underpins Gwibber. From here you can manage Gwibber so much better that trying to rely on the default interface

Bear in mind that this gies you access to the full Couch Db for your system so you get access to other component using couch as its backend, so when dealing with Gwibber just aim for collections prefixed with “gwibber_” and you should be fine.

So now I can manage the interface a lot better Im more than happy to continue using gwibber as a social client and have been very happy thus far. It still needs work as you shouldnt have to go into couchDb to have to manage things but at least its useable now