When Twitter had integration with IM, the IM was the only way I used Twitter. First, the IM (I use Google Talk) is always running on my computer. And then, logging on to Twitter to post a message and check statuses is such a pain.
I have been itching to get Twitter on my IM and was porting my twitter friends statuses into Friendfeed and pushing them to the IM as a workaround.
But since Google App Engine has now brought XMPP to its platform, writing a custom Twitter port on IM couldn’t be easier.
http://twitteresque.appspot.com/ is my application written on Python which brings Twitter to your Google Talk IM.
I used OAuth for the app to get access to Twitter and then a cron job to routinely check messages every hour and post to Twitter. Right now, you can post messages by typing into the chat window directly and fetch records manually by just typing in ‘fetch’.
Getting OAuth working from App Engine was a breeze thanks to these examples given here:
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-Examples Especially, http://github.com/tav/tweetapp/tree/master