Top Social Media Applications for Linux

When you look online for reviews of social media applications, Windows and Apple platform applications always dominate the list. Linux geeks, however, have a long history of using social media tools to discuss geeky and techie topics online. Until fairly recently, however, most large scale development around social media tools on Linux was virtually non-existent. Linux users were expected to follow their usual fare of bare bones interfaces and text based controls. With the growing interest of Linux on the desktop for the more general audience, however, many developers have started putting effort toward creating more user friendly applications for social media. While this of course is beneficial for newer users of Linux who came from the Microsoft and Apple platforms, using and contributing to these social media apps is also in the best interest of anyone who wants to further the Linux cause and gain more market acceptance for our favorite open source operating system.

Gwibber

Anyone fan of the Ubuntu distro who also frequents social media sites is probably familiar with Gwibber. This social media app pretty much runs standard any Ubuntu installation. This Python based application supports Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg and Facebook all in one easy to use graphic user interface. The next version of Gwibber will continue to roll out support to further social media sites, specifically Reddit.

Features

• Supports many different social networks
• Provides a combined stream of all your messages
• Automatically shortens URLs when they are pasted
• Built-in search tool and support for saved searches
• Optional support for spell-checking as you type
• HTML themes let you customize Gwibber’s look and feel
• Multicolumn user interface for viewing multiple streams

Choqok

Choquok is an extremely popular social media micro blogging application for Linux. It was originally built on the KDE platform, so integrates seamlessly into the KDE4 desktop environment. Choqok provides all of the most popular features required for a full featured social media application. It provides support for performing translations on foreign language messages and easily uploading photo and video files. It can be used with Twitter and Identi.ca as well as local installation of status.net.

Features

• Supporting Twitter, Identi.ca and self hosted StatusNet websites micro-blogging service
• Supports multiple accounts
• Find and follow other users
• View user profile information
• Retweet, reply, and favorite with one click
• Support for Twitter lists
• Shorten URLs with more than 10 different services
• Upload images to Flickr, ImageShack, Twitpic, Twitgoo, Mobypicture and Posterous
• Preview Images from Twitpic, YFrog, img.ly, plixi, Twitgoo, TweetPhoto and etc. services.
• Preview Videos from YouTube and Vimeo services.
• Support for KDE notifications
• Post text translations using Google Translate
• Filter unwanted posts out of your feed

Hotot

Hotot is the newest app in this list – in fact, it is still in beta. Despite that fact, this app may have the most polished graphic user interface of all the apps listed here. Beautiful animations and sleek borders and colors make this app design friendly enough that it could give any social media application on Apple a run for its money. One disadvantage to this app is that since it is still in beta, only connections to Twitter and identi.ca work as intended right now. Users of Ubuntu and Debian who wish to get this app can easily do so through PPA. Fedora users can also download a native client. If you are not interested in installing a native client, there is also a Google Chrome version that will run right in your Chrome browser without having to install anything locally.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is possibly the most popular Twitter application for the desktop across all the popular platforms. While a native client for Linux is not yet available, users on Linux can download the version hosted on Adobe AIR on almost all Linux distros. Once you install Adobe AIR, you can pick up the Tweetdeck application from Adobe’s website. Aside from Twitter, Tweetdeck also supports Identi.ca, Facebook and Google Buzz.

Spaz

A common trait among Linux users is the desire to get into the guts of their applications and do some tweaking. Spaz is an open source social media application that seems to be built for this purpose. It is built on pure Javascript, XHTML and CSS, using the Jquery web application framework. Even if you are not a Jquery expert, it is easy to apply your own custom themes by fooling around with the CSS scripts. In addition to the traditional social media sites, Spaz also supports ping.fm and bit.ly.


Author Byline

The article is written by Jason Phillips; he is a curator at an ancient museum. Apart from that he likes to dofree webcam chat and free vide chat. Also, he is soul is deeply into blogging.

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