Adium has been a long-time favorite of many Mac users. While the free program started as a basic AIM client several years ago, the program now can connect you to not only your AIM buddies, but Google Talk contacts, MSN and Yahoo! chat buddies, and Facebook friends. Add all that to an interface that allows endless customization, and you get one slick app.
But there has been one hole in Adium for a long time: Twitter support. That’s changing:
Fear not! Using Matt Gemmell’s MGTwitterEngine, a library used to communicate with the Twitter API, I’ve managed to make what I consider to be a very good Twitter client into Adium. Your friends (people you follow) are displayed in a group on the Contact List: adding or removing will follow or unfollow them, and chatting with them will send (or receive) direct messages.
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A group chat named “Timeline (username)” (you can rename it like I have above) will appear alongside your Twitter contacts. When new tweets arrive, this group chat will open; you can close it to help keep your place in the tweets, or leave it open and watch them arrive. Of course, the check interval is customizable (between never checking and checking every hour), and you can force an update through the chat’s context menu. There’s also an option to automatically update tweets when you send one.
There’s no release date for this feature (to be part of their 1.4 release), but this is going to kill a lot of smaller Twitter applications out there. And become the hub for many social media users on the Mac.