How to set up TwitterSpy in Google Talk
An enterprising developer has brought the Track feature back to Twitter! As I have written before, Twitter Track lets you follow keywords or subjects. This is important to grok. Tell GTalk ‘track silverlight’ and any Tweet containing the word silverlight, no matter whether it is in your twitter stream of followers or not will show up in GTalk. This is huge and lets find people talking about subjects you are interested in. Really the greatest way to find people with like interests as well as the experts on topics.
It was awesome! Then, Twitter disabled it a month or so ago for reasons they say are related to performance. Serious drag for power users and completely breaks my Ultimate Twitter Client. We got some of the features back with a 3rd party tool called Summize. Summize lets you create a search string and gives you real time results. This allows you to keep a browser tab open to Summize with your search query. Summize will then update the page to tell you there are new results. Here, for example, is how I track tweets containing my user name (either a direct @techlifeweb or the word techlifeweb somewhere within the tweet) but not tweets that I post:
If I leave the results open and another result is later found, the screen will update to show:
Summize has a whole set of operators that you can string together to help you find what you are looking for. Read more: Summize Operators. On a side note, Twitter may be obtaining Summize, according to TechCrunch this afternoon.
TwitterSpy gives you a mashup of XMPP (the IM protocol that Google Talk/Chat uses) and Summize data. This lets you track query strings through your IM client rather than having to refresh a tab all the time. It also extends Summize to other devices that you can use IM on (e.g., Blackberry).
To get it set up in Google Chat (the IM feature with in GMail. This will work for Google Talk as well):
1. In Gmail, go to the chat sidebar and paste in twitterspy@jabber.org
2. In the popover that opens, click Invite to Chat
3. You will get another window, click Send Invites
This will generate an auto response for twitterspy and twitterspy will then become a friend that you can IM with. First thing to do is IM ‘help’ (no quotes) and you will get a list of the things you can do:
off Disable updates.
on Activate updates.
track Track a topic (summize query string)
tracks List your tracks.
untrack Stop tracking a topic
For example, if I want to create a query like the one above, I simply IM: track techlifeweb -from:techlifeweb
So glad to have at least pseudo-track back! We’ll see what happens if a Twitter/Summize merger goes forward.
UPDATE 19JUL08: Many changes have been made to TwitterSpy. Typing help:
autopost Enable or disable autopost
follow Follow a user
help Get help for commands.
lang Set your language.
leave Leave (stop following) a user
off Disable updates.
on Activate updates.
post Post a message to twitter.
search Perform a sample search (but do not track)
track Track a topic (summize query string)
tracks List your tracks.
twlogin Set your twitter username and password (use at your own risk)
twlogout Discard your twitter credentials
untrack Stop tracking a topic
watch_friends Enable or disable watching friends.
whois Find out who a particular user is.
You can then then use twlogin to log into twitter via TwitterSpy in Gtalk. Then you can post new messages to Twitter. Only slight difference at present is you need to type the word ‘post’ before you tweet. For example: post Hello World will show up in Twitter as Hello World. The command ‘post’ does not count toward your 140 character count.
The command ‘watch_friends on’ will allow you to see all your friends tweets. This is cool but things can really fly by at times. I still prefer the Hahlo web page when I am at my computer.
Also, I meant to link to this in the original post, see Rob La Gesse’s excellent post on Twitter and Track for one of the best explanations I’ve seen to help people ‘get’ Track.
I just spent 2 hours writing a script to do the exact same thing (for one user). Why didn’t I find this sooner?
[...] one hour after I finished writing the script a came across an article about a service called Twitterspy that now does the same thing. I still will probably use my script [...]
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
THis says it all: I say What?
twitterspy@jabber.org
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (state 14).
—– Original message —–
@Mike Cunningham, I don’t understand what you mean. Did you try to email twitterspy@jabber.org? It isn’t an email address.
I’m getting the same failure message.
Hmmm… I’ll see what I can find out.
Why does it say ‘twlogin Set your twitter username and password (use at your own risk)’? What risk is that?
I must be doing something wrong, not getting any updates from twitterspy on gtalk. Have turned on ‘activate updates’. Twhirl works fine, almost no latency.
Christopher, are you doing a track in twitterspy? like ‘track twitterspy’?
You don’t have to twlogin, that is just if you want to also post through twitterspy.
Post questions on twitter an the author will find you as long as you use twitterspy somewhere in your tweet because he tracks twitterspy
[...] For those who miss the “track” feature on Twitter: “help track”. (more info on TwitterSpy). [...]
[...] if a user is replying to another user. In fact, even today you can use an XMPP tracker like Twitter Spy and Laconica Spy and track your username and get notified when a person mentions your username, [...]
[...] with “hacks” such as Summize search (now acquired and called Twitter search) and Twitterspy, which relies on the former. This is not track. This is a hack. I’m not knocking the authors [...]
Thanks for this feature