Twitter is IRC 2.0 as much as Web 2.0, but just as Notepad is both more popular and less featured than emacs, most Twitter clients (including the webpage) lag far behind the awesome, polished tool that is irssi for chatting.
Sure, there are stop-gaps. Before Twitter decided that their chat interface was either too difficult to keep running, or they realised it was an end-run around SMS and potential ad revenue, you could use BitlBee to chat from your IRC client. Then there’s twirssi which frankly just feels weird.
I made do with the most excellent ttytter for a while, but I missed nice things like tab completion and scrollback, along with real command-line editing.
Enter tircd, the Twitter IRC daemon. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re comfortable with irssi and screen there should be no issues in getting it going. The instructions are clear and to the point. Once running, connect to the Twitter “server” by running:
/connect 127.0.0.1 6667 <password> <username>
and join the channel #twitter.
Your latest status will be reflected in the topic. Your follower’s entries are shown just like in IRC, and friends are “voiced” (their nick has a preceding plus-sign), a very nice touch.
I’ve only been running tircd since today, but so far it’s the best Twitter client for the console that I’ve used. Highly recommended.