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Why gwibber sucks

Ok, this is kind of a rant. However, after hours and hours of struggling with it, I have decided that gwibber sucks.


But let's start from the beginning...

Gwibber is a little microblogging program which currently supports a wealth of services, from twitter to flickr, to digg. It is the first choice for Ubuntu, and it ships with it. You get a little icon in the Ubuntu messaging menu that says "Broadcast", which opens it, if you click on it.

The problem with Gwibber is that it lacks most of the functionality you actually need for a useful social network application. When you use it, you get the weird feeling it stops right before something you may actually need, in between "I don't need this crap" and "It is really useful".

It is something like "I can live with it". But not quite. You got the feeling, right?

But while it may be ok for twitter (even though there is plenty of better alternative around), where it really sucks is with facebook. Big time.

First of all, there is a known bug (which has been there practically forever) that prevents you to authorize the program with facebook in a simple way. You want to add your facebook account to gwibber? Well, just click on Edit -> Accounts and you will be prompted with a window that has a scroll down menu. If you select facebook, you are then sent, from within the program, to a login page, where you will need to tell facebook to allow gwibber, etc. etc. Once this is done, you should get a button telling you to add your facebook account to gwibber.

This is where it gets completely random. From what I have been able to figure out, if gwibber is somehow already in your applications (like, maybe you were able to authorize it with facebook from another computer), then you will not be able to authorize it again. So, you will get a very annoying (I swear, after three times I wanted to smash my laptop against the wall) and very long window where there is nothing to push which says "Authorized" and "Success". But is it? Yeah, it is, but only if you remove this piece of useless software. A trick (which also works randomly) is to go to your facebook page, click on privacy settings and edit applcations. Then remove gwibber and try again. But, hey, try to do that from multiple computers! If you remove the authorization, gwibber on the computer you already authorized will stop updating and you will get nothing but days old friends messages reminding you that your favorite soccer team lost the last game. It sucks, right?

If you are able, somehow, to get the program running with facebook, things do not get much better. Gwibber lacks a few simple, but important features. First of all, it does not seem it can distinguish between the messages and the wall posts. So when you click on "Messages", you actually get the wall posts. This feature works slightly better with twitter. Moreover, if there is a post with several comments, only some of them are displayed. Are they the last ones? Well, that would be reasonable, would it? No, you get comments in a totally random order. Well, but that would be fine... if we could actually see all of them. But you can't. You just see those two or three messages, and that's all. And, of course, you cannot "Like" a specific comment, but only the main message. Which, by the way, does not work all the time, of course.

I am stunned. I am actually hoping this program gets nuked from Ubuntu as soon as possible. The real problem is that, while for twitter, digg, flickr and such there are a few alternatives, there are not so many for facebook (apart from prism, which is a trick). There is one little, very nice piece of software, which is called yoono. It works great, but it does not have a full integration with Ubuntu. This means that you need to compile it, you don't get an icon for it anywhere, it lays in your desktop somewhere and, of course, it does not go in your message menu. You cannot minimize it (you can use alltray, but this is a trick). There is no integration, I repeat. Which sucks, because it let you waste time. And it does not work after suspend or hibernate. You need to restart it, which is, again, a few clicks. But this is another story....

I told you this was a rant...