Along with many of my OU colleagues, I have been using Twitter to regularly post my 140 character thoughts and share them with people who follow me. It has become a very popular service, and despite the simple nature of its core service all sorts of innovative add-ons have been dreamt of to enhance its functionality, Twitterholics gives a good sense of what is being developed. Twitter can be updated through its website or an increasing number of clients that are being developed for it. One of these clients is KDE Twitter, which I first saw on a screenshot on the Kubuntu website, but had a bit of trouble it tracking down. KDE Twitter is a Plasmoid, a widget that can be added to the KDE4 desktop.

Trouble was that "apt-cache search kde twitter" turned up nothing, but this is in the repositories and can be found in the package extragear-plasma which contains KDE Twitter along with a few other plasmoids including a 3D globe (which sadly did not work for me), a dictionary, a picture frame, a holder for cartoon strips, and a plasmoid for KDE API reference. These give a sense of what plasmoids might be able to do. The upcoming release of version 4.1 of KDE also appears to be promising the ability to build plasmoids with HTML and Javascript, which might mean that embedding things like Google Gadgets may become possible.

The extra plasmoids are fun, and do show off a very interesting aspect of the KDE4 desktop. Not many plasmoids exist yet so it will be interesting to see what people do with this technology when KDE4 becomes a bit more popular. They are at an early stage and KDE Twitter has a way to go before it catches up with clients like Twhirl, but looks promising.