Twitter Times Two

March 17, 2008 6:44 PM

Is there a way (preferably using the @ command or IM) that I can post to a second Twitter account? I want to use the other account as a list of the books that I have read - a simple "blog" with the title, author and a quick thought. Thanks.
posted by whybesubtle to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Why not just use the web interface for posting to the second account? Honestly, are you reading books so fast that you can't get to a computer before you've finished the next one?
posted by mumkin at 6:46 PM on March 17

I maintain two Twitter accounts by having one I access through a client (in my case, Twitterific on the Mac) and one I access through a web browser. Easy enough, no?
posted by anildash at 6:58 PM on March 17

With pidgin, you can have more than one client of gtalk running.
posted by bigmusic at 7:16 PM on March 17

@mumkin & @anild That's an idea that I'll give a try.

For the time being I am reading twitter only in the browser - a bit of self-reward. I have turned off the SMS just to minimize the distraction. So I keep my main account with the browser interface. I'll take another look at Twitterific.

Thanks all!

If there are other ideas out there I am happy to hear them.
posted by whybesubtle at 7:45 PM on March 17

Umm...

I do this kind of thing ( logging into the same website with 2 ids ) simply by running a copy of FireFox and a Copy of IE at the same time.

Firefox = account 1
IE = Account 2

My employer keeps 4 gmail accounts open by using FF, IE, Opera and one other browser who's name escapes me at the moment.
posted by petethered at 8:45 PM on March 17

I've used the web based Twitter, Twitteriffic, TwitterPost, Spaz (with cool vt100 theme), whatever the Firefox plugin is, and Snitter. You can easily log in to one with one username and one with another. I have a low-traffic twitter account that I log into via the web form and the one I use more regularly that I use Spaz for. The second account has an email address that is a variant of the first [so like bob@gmail and bobx@gmail] so even if I were to log in to the web client with both accounts, Firefox has both autocompletes pretty easily in there.
posted by jessamyn at 8:47 PM on March 17

If you really want to geek out, you can go with the command line. There is a guide here: http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2007/03/18/scripting-twitter-with-curl/

I have it set up right now so all I do is type: twitter "this is a message." and it posts to my twitter account. That is how I maintain two accounts (one in Safari, the other in Terminal).
posted by trevor Manternach at 11:13 PM on March 17

This is an online service that allows you to post to multiple twitter accounts wih only one login:
http://t.widgeo.us/.
posted by awfurby at 12:01 AM on March 18

Using the Launchy setup described here, you could create a .bat file for each account. I have this set up for Twitter and it makes posting less of a distraction. Multiple accounts wouldn't be much different. Of course, that all assumes Windows, but you could do the same thing with cURL and Quicksilver. Or a Quicksilver plug-in that probably already exists.
posted by yerfatma at 5:40 AM on March 18

@yerfatma : .... hmmn Quicksilver, eh? That sounds like a perfect solution.

Anybody have a line on the Quicksilver way to do things? @merlinmann - where are you?
posted by whybesubtle at 7:51 AM on March 18

Quicksilver plug-in that probably already exists

I'm not seeing one available from within Quicksilver, at least, but I'm not quite sure what's happening now that development has stopped on the current incarnation. You can root around the docs though.
posted by mumkin at 8:03 AM on March 18

It's called Tweet - http://blog.codahale.com/2007/01/15/tweet-twitter-quicksilver/

I'm trying to figure it out... every time I try something new with Quicksilver I know I'm operating on the edge of my knowledge/ability...
posted by whybesubtle at 8:35 AM on March 18

Seems like you don't need to be logged in to the second account hardly at all. Once you've chosen a name and created its twitter account, you can just @whybesubtlebookslist blahblahblahblah and view its page while logged in as your "regular" user. Am I missing something in your requirements?
posted by olecranon at 6:43 PM on March 18

@olecranon - I can do that but I would like to set up the second twitter account to add that feed to Jaiku where I have a list of all of the feeds that I'm generating.

I also just found twirl which I'll give a try. http://www.twhirl.org/

I seem to me missing a part of the scripting in order to get Tweet to work...
posted by whybesubtle at 10:00 PM on March 18