To post to a specific account, just type your message like this:

I am posting to my other account. --@other_account --post

If you haven't yet authorized TwitterBar for @other_account, you'll be walked through the authorization process.

If you've authorized more than one account, and you don't specify which account you want to post to, you'll be given a list of choices:

You can manage your accounts from the TwitterBar options (just type "--options").

Finally, to authorize a new account without posting to it, just type "--account" in the URL bar.

To install this new version of TwitterBar, download it from Mozilla Add-ons.

The next obvious step is the ability to post to multiple accounts simultaneously, and the next version of TwitterBar will offer than feature. If you'd like to beta-test that update, e-mail me and let me know.

One of the things that annoys me about Twitter is the constant "check-ins" from location apps like foursquare and Gowalla. Since I don't use these apps, I don't especially care that you're at the Starbucks in Dallas or that you're the mayor of your bus stop.

To solve this problem, I wrote a browser add-on called Twitter Filter. It adds a little "X" next to the source of each Twitter status update; if you click that X, you will never see updates from that source again (at least not on the Twitter website):

The sources you've blocked are listed in Twitter's right sidebar so that you can easily unblock them:

That's all there is to Twitter Filter, and it's a new type of browser add-on for me. It has options, but no options dialogs. There's no toolbar button, no browser sidebar - everything related to the add-on is controlled via the Twitter Web interface, so it's not so much an extension of the browser but rather an extension of Twitter itself. Go ahead and install it on a friend's computer and convince them that Twitter added the feature - it'll be fun! Be sure to come back and recount your grand prank in the comments below.

What does this mean? Well, now when you post a URL to Twitter with TwitterBar, you have 125 characters for your message instead of 122. So feel free to toss an extra LOL or BRB in there; you've got plenty of room.

• URL shortening
  • Long URLs are now shortened by http://is.gd/ before being sent to Twitter. is.gd offers the shortest URLs around, so you have more room in your tweet for your words. (TwitterBar's character counter takes into account the fact that all of your URLs will only be 18 characters long when they're posted, so you always know exactly how much room you have left to tweet.)
• Support for OAuth.
  • OAuth is basically a way to allow applications (like TwitterBar) to act on your behalf (update your status) without having to disclose your Twitter password to the application. So it’s safer for you, since you don’t have to worry about malicious programmers stealing your usernames and passwords, since you never gave them out. After you upgrade to this version of TwitterBar, you’ll have to authorize it once, but then you’ll never have to do it again.
• Bug fixes and code cleanup
  • These are good!

You can download TwitterBar from Mozilla Add-ons (for free!), or you can wait for Firefox to automatically notify you of the update. (By the way, if you want to connect with me on Twitter, I'm @cfinke.)

After grabbing a copy of the code running @SanMo, (it's the same Perl script created to power @lotd, available here), I quickly decided that I would rather write my own, for three reasons:

• Strike 1: It was written in Perl.
• Strike 2: It didn't implement a feature that links the retweet to the original tweet.
• Strike 3: It required MySQL - a bit much for simple bot.
• Bonus Strike 4: It was written in Perl.

I sought out to write a lightweight script that would accomplish the same end goal (republishing tweets directed at a given account), and I'm happy to say that it's finished: retweet.py has been running smoothly for the past few weeks behind the Twitter account SWMetro, a service for Twitter users in the southwest metro area of the Twin Cities.

It's 40 lines of Python (if you omit blank lines and comments), and you can grab a copy of it from here. It uses SQLite for storage (which you should already have installed if you have Python installed), and it utilizes the great python-twitter library from Dewitt Clinton of Google. (Make sure you get the latest version for trunk; you'll need simplejson as well, as python-twitter requires it.)

Just download the script and replace "username" and "password" at the top with your account credentials. (You can manage multiple accounts by adding another username/password pair to the ACCOUNTS variable.) Change the DB_PATH variable to point to the directory where you'll keep your SQLite databases, and then add this to your crontab:

*/2 * * * * python /full/path/to/retweet.py

The script will run every other minute, republishing any tweets that start with "@username", where "username" is the value you gave the USER variable. The only thing it stores in the SQLite database are the status id's of the tweets it republishes, and it links each retweet to the original message being republished. If the new message is longer than 140 characters, it chops words off of the end, replacing them with "..." until it's under the 140 character limit.

If you're using this script to replace an existing retweet bot, you can supply it with the status id of the last message it re-published so that you don't end up republishing a bunch of old tweets. To do that, just run it once like this:

$ python retweet.py 12345

where 12345 is the status id of the last message your existing bot published.

Feel free to download retweet.py and use it for your own purposes. All I ask is that if you make an improvement (or start up a new service with it), take a minute and mention it in the comments below.

Update: Some people have had to use the full path to Python (version 2.5 or greater) in their crontab to get retweet.py working properly.

Update: Retweet.py has been updated to ensure it keeps working as intended after Twitter started categorizing all tweets that contain a username as replies, not just ones that start with the username. Grab the updated version here.

This is bad news for Twitter. Up until now, they've been the market leader in the "Popular websites that are unavailable" category, but with Amazon.com as competition, they'll have a hard time keeping that position.

Names removed to protect the innocent.

All of this cross-posting is done behind the scenes using various APIs, so there aren't additional popup windows to fill out for each service. We'll be adding more services as they're requested.