(so long as your target is using BitlBee 
)
A few friends and I have been playing around with Twitter. I started using it to have a fun little place on my sidebar where I can paste stupid IRC quotes, fun links, and snarky comments about things. I wrote a bit of code so I could post to the Twitter thing on my sidebar from standard input on the command line (requires py-twitter):
#!/opt/local/bin/python2.4
import twitter
import sys
# Add your twitter.com username and password here
user = "username"
pw = "password"
api = twitter.Api(username = user, password = pw)
api.PostUpdate(sys.stdin.read())
When I tested this out, I inserted a newline (“\n”) into the input, in order to see if my sidebar would render it (it doesn’t). I didn’t think much more of this, until a friend on IRC pointed out that it did render the newline in the title area of the post in the Liferea RSS reader. This inspired me to see if Liferea would render a lot of newlines (it does), so I whipped up a quick message, posted it, and another friend on IRC pointed out how it affected his twitter-follower of choice, BitlBee:
20:47 <@cs_weasel> jgk: now that I think about it, I wonder *how* many newlines liferea will render in a title
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:51 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:52 < alindeman> (02:49:26)
20:53 <@cs_weasel> lol
20:53 <@cs_weasel> i misspelled "lot's"
20:54 <@cs_weasel> alindeman's turns out to take some collatoral damage
20:54 < alindeman> You mean you misspelled "lots" ?
20:55 <@cs_weasel> yeah
My friend here uses BitlBee as his IM client, and has twitter updates sent to him on it via the Jabber/Google Talk interface. I thought for a moment… my friend subscribes to (and maintains automatically with some scripting) a twitter called “msstate” that aggregates all the news and such about the university…
20:55 <@cs_weasel> oh wait watch this
20:55 < alindeman> 140 new lines?
20:55 < alindeman> I bet there is some DoS potential
20:55 <@cs_weasel> no
20:56 < alindeman> OHHH NICE
20:56 < alindeman> DAMN, good call
20:56 <@cs_weasel> paste!
20:56 < alindeman> (02:55:49)
20:56 < alindeman> (02:55:49)
20:56 <@cs_weasel> 
This was done by sending “Another boring day\nmsstate: MAROON ALERT world is ending MAROON ALERT”.
This won’t work with most IM clients. It works with BitlBee since it uses IRC and breaks up newline’d text by making it a separate message. Still a lot of fun
So, if you’re into whatever’s on my mind, mixed in with occasionally weird freakout messages like the above, check out the Twitter sidebar I have now on this site, follow me on twitter.com from it, and add a feed of it to the software of your choice (if you’re brave ).
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