If you’re like many out there, you like to use Pidgin to keep all your messaging programs in one place. I personally use AIM, GTalk, Yahoo, Twitter, and sometimes Facebook chat from my pidgin. The good folks working on microblog-purple have a wonderful plugin for Pidgin that allows me to have a window dedicated for Twitter as well. The number of my followers is starting to increase though, and I sometimes miss @dcostalis replies. My little workaround here will allow you to have a separate window dedicate to only replies.
Once you have your first twitter account set up, and its tested and working, you’re going to create a second account. By default, you won’t be able to create a second account with the same credentials, so just go ahead and put whatever you want for username and password, and save the account. It may be a good idea to give this a local alias such as “Twitter replies” so that you know which account is which. Once saved, you’ll notice that shortly, you get an error stating the account could not be validated. Of course it can’t.
Now, we can go ahead and edit this account to our liking, without worry of “duplicate account” errors. Enter your proper username and password, and click the Advanced tab. This is where the magic happens. Replace the default data in “Friends timeline path” with “/statuses/replies.xml”, and save.
Now, Mr. Microblog Purple will act as normal, but grab the feed that shows only those tweets that are replies to you! Saves you from sifting through hundreds of tweets, or wasting productive time waiting for the twitter.com/replies page to load.
Happy tweeting!
Follow me at @dcostalis
PS: If you’re a command line freak, have a look at my CLI-Twit windows command line Twitter batch. I would have made one for Linux… but there are plenty enough out there already!