Twitter and GNOME integration
10 April 2008
This is part two of our look at using Python with the API of the Twitter social networking website. (Part one here)
I am assuming you are using a GNOME-based Unix/Linux system. If you use something else then sorry, you might want to read one of my other posts.
So in Twitter, you can have updates of what your friends are doing appear on the Twitter website (like this), however, it is more fun to make these updates come to you.
So I wrote a little program in Python that makes your Twitter updates pop-up on the desktop, like this:
This uses a feature of the Gnome desktop called 'notify', as explained by Andy W, and then followed up by me two posts ago.
Without further ado, lets get started.
1. Get python-notify
There are three very small but important dependencies. Firstly, you need the Python bindings for libnotify. These are available from your Linux distribution (you might even have them installed them already):
You will need setuptools as well. I am sure you already have that installed, but it cannot hurt to double-check.
The two computers I have here are Ubuntu and Gentoo:
On Ubuntu or Debian:
sudo apt-get install python-notify python-setuptools
On Gentoo:
sudo emerge notify-python setuptools
On your Linux/Unix, you can alter the commands slightly so it matches your package management system.
2. Get json and Twitter bindings
Now we need two more, simplejson and python-twitter
From any Linux Distribution, run:
sudo easy_install simplejson
sudo easy_install python-twitter
3. Twitter account
Next you will need to sign up to a Twitter account and add at least one friend (e.g. zeth0), in the spooky terminology of twitter, to add a friend you "follow them".
4. Get my script
Next you need to download a copy of my script and make the file extension .py. Get it from here, or type:
wget http://zeth.me.uk/python/twitnotify.txt -O twitnotify.py
chmod +x twitnotify.py
Now you need to edit the top of the script so that your username and password are correct. For historical reasons, I'm an Emacs man, but if you don't have a favourite editor, then gedit is pretty easy to use:
gedit twitnotify.py
5. Engage!
Now we are finally ready to run the script:
./twitnotify.py
If you have a lot of friends then there will be lots of updates the first time. The updates and pictures are all cached, so you don't have to download those again.
Six degrees of separation
After I made that script, I tried to be more adventurous and wrote a new script that found other people that shared your interests.
It would spider recursively through your friends, followers and their friends and followers, and their friends and followers, and their friends and followers (and so on), and returned a set of updates based on whatever keywords you specified.
It worked pretty well and the results were really fun. However, what I didn't know was that Twitter has quite sharp rate limits, so when this script stopped working I was combing through the code to find out what had gone wrong. It turned out that my code was fine but that my username had just been suspended from Twitter.
Twitter rate usage
Your username is allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from the first request.
Using my original twitnotify.py script posed no problem, the script usually uses three requests each time (one for normal updates, one for replies and one for personal "direct" messages).
So if you update every 10 minutes, then that will be about 18 requests an hour, easily under your 70 maximum.
Getting the photos of your friends is included in the above, but the first time you get a private message from a new person who is not a friend, it will take one request to download the photo.
My second script, the one to find new friends according to your interests, easily ate up 70 requests in one pass. So I had to give that up.
Fortunately, it seems that you are automatically un-suspended from Twitter after a couple of hours, and having your username temporally suspended from the API does not affect logging into the Twitter website.
1 andylockran says...
Zeth - great post. Just one of a number of things programmers have to catch them out. I reckon that libnotifytwitter package could be packaged up for either ubuntu/gentoo - as gentoo's twitter support at the mo appeared to be nil.
Posted at 1:48 a.m. on April 11, 2008
2 rar says...
oh my. it's so easy.
just 1, 2, 3 4, and ur done.
Posted at 3:53 a.m. on April 11, 2008
3 Michael Klier says...
Great tool indeed!
However I'd like to point out that it also runs perfectly fine in a non-GNOME environment ;-) (I am using awesome WM here).
Posted at 6:08 p.m. on April 12, 2008
4 Neo says...
Great script but it didn't work here. I followed the 4 steps but it showed:
gobject.GError: The name org.freedesktop.Notifications was not provided by any .service files
What should I do to get it run? Thanks!
Posted at 3:56 p.m. on May 4, 2008
5 Zeth says...
@Neo,
It looks like you have a dependency problem. Are you sure you have libnotify on your system?
Posted at 4:46 p.m. on May 4, 2008
6 andrew says...
Excellent work. Using python for app creation in gnome is awesome.
Do you have any interest of changing this into a gnome panel applet that would allow you to post tweets to your account as well as notify?
I could see this as having quite a bit of potential!
Posted at 2:44 p.m. on May 7, 2008
7 Grimmy says...
@Neo:
I just had the same problem on Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). I tried various things, but eventually solved it by installing notification-daemon ( sudo apt-get install notification-daemon ).
Hope that helps.
Posted at 1:18 p.m. on May 11, 2008
8 yegle says...
@Zeth Hello Zeth,can you share your script you mentioned about the Six degrees of separation?I'm so intrested about it~
And, this is really an excellent work !Thank you for shareing !
Posted at 12:18 p.m. on June 12, 2008
9 marco says...
Hey,
thnx for this script, i love it. I made a little change wich allows to set the expire time of the notification. Created a patch for this, have a look at: http://pastebin.com/f14f1972e
So again thnx for your work
bye
marco
Posted at 5:40 p.m. on February 19, 2009
10 Christian says...
Hi,
great script! I had problems downloading it from your location, but I found it here too: http://media.commandline.org.uk//code/twitnotify.txt
bye,
Christian
Posted at 3:51 p.m. on March 27, 2009
11 Cale says...
Fun script. Thanks for posting. Like Christian mentioned, I had trouble with the download link as well. Working well on my Gentoo box, though.
Posted at 3:47 p.m. on April 11, 2009
12 suyash says...
nice script..good work dude
Posted at 8:05 p.m. on June 8, 2009