I really like Gwibber, but there are so many quirks I can’t give it more than 3.5 stars. Graphically speaking, the interface is nice. It isn’t cluttered with all kinds of buttons, and everything is presented in a nice “bubbly” way. It displays the avatar of the user to the left, with a bubble to the right with their Tweet (or similar social post). It supports multiple accounts, as well as different types of accounts. As of this post, it supports:

  • Flickr
  • Twitter
  • StatusNet
  • Qaiku
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Digg
  • Identi.ca

There are several preferences you can set. You can have it display mentions and DMs, or not. You can also set the amount of time between refreshes. And, my favorite option of all, you can select whether you want to see real names or “Twitter handles”. Perhaps my favorite thing of all, it integrates right into the Ubuntu messaging system (it is shipped with the install, after all).

This is where things fall apart. My largest gripe is that you can’t view profiles and follow other users with a click of a button! What? That’s on the checklist for basic Twitter usability! This was filed as a bug and fixed in future releases, as far as I can tell from this bug report, but what about now? Well, for now you have to type into the box “follow [Twitter handle here]”. What is this, IRC?

Another thing that I hate is if you click on a username to see their profile (which you can’t do), it saves a stream of their Tweets to your sidebar. It also does this every time you search Twitter. You have to manually go to Gwibber > Close Stream to kill it. This annoys me more than I can express in a review.

If you want a simple social network client, albeit with a few quirks to work out, Gwibber is your open-source friend. If you want to take control of Twitter, have multiple columns and views, and advanced usability features, I’d look somewhere else (I quite like both Seesmic and TweetDeck, if we’re talking non-open software). For most people though, Gwibber is all you need or want.

Sadly, it’s not cross-platform. It’s Linux-only, in fact. If that’s not a problem for you, it’s likely already installed on your system.

If not, you can install here.