socialmedian: Twitter needs a command-line

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Twitter needs a command-line

Source: TwitLinks

Nov 06, 2009

Summary

Imagine a terminal program that accepted commands like:

twitter> follow davewiner

twitter> follow ev

twitter> unfollow sexygirl209

twitter> addtolist scoble halfmoonbay -u

The first few commands are obvious, the last would add scoble to a list called halfmoonbay and unfollow him.

I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better.

Then I thought how nice it is for a developer to just be able to shoot the text of a tweet over at the status box on Twitter, where the user is already logged-in. But that just works for tweets. What about follow and unfollow, and list operations? And a myriad of other chores that now you can do either interactively or through the API.

Why not have something in the middle, more techy than the point and click interface, but easier than the API. We alr ...Read the full article

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