So I had a difficult time trying to understand "Why Twitter", even after I began using it. I like integration. Why have yet another method to stay connected, when we have blogging, social network sites, instant message networks up the wazoo, irc, etc and etc...?

So, I integrated twitter into my Drupal site using the aptly named module Twitter so that every time I post something new, it tweets out. Well this is a nice excuse as to "why use it", but isn't that just another way to do what is basically rss?

I continued on my Twitter adventure by installing a few basic desktop twitter clients, Twitux and gtwitter, but didn't like the idea of running yet another little app to stay abreast of my news, friends and family. Seems like Pidgin does this fine already..OH WAIT!

So what is the point? In my neurotic need to simplify and centralize everything I went out looking and found me some Microblog-purple , aka: mbpurple. This is a great little plugin for Pidgin that integrates Twitter (and beta support for identi.ca and so forth) with my favorite multi-protocol instant-messaging/chat client! Yay! Another reason to play with Twitter. And seeing Twitter in action in the same context of instant messaging and chat protocols suddenly brought Twitter into the whole "sense making" world for me.

It's a simple plugin, you get a new buddy-list category called "Twitter" with a new buddy called "Twitter" who's incoming messages are any tweets that hit your account prepended with the name of the tweeter, and all of your tweets from other clients. You post to Twitter by sending a message through Pidgin. It even has a 140 character counter for you so that you don't post over the limit. Simple!