@ Cenk İlker İzanlı:

You are sending an update via standard http request – it’s not secure at all. If you use https on the other hand, it’s a different story.

Hello folks,

First good tut for startup,I wonder how secure is this method?

Thank you. I love tweeting with cURL. It was all I needed to get started with automatic tweets.
Thanks
Joemsie

[...] Posting Twitter Updates via Curl. Tutorial on posting an update to twitter using just curl and nothing else. [...]

[quote post="1475"]How can I give a tweet with the source for example “Terminal”. Default tweets have the source “web”, “IM”, “phone” or “Twitterific” [/quote]

Richard Bronosky is correct. You need to obtain an API key by filling out this form:

http://twitter.com/help/request_source

Your application must then be approved by the Twitter team. They mostly decide whether to approve a request or not, based on the project website you submit. Yes, you have to build a custom app, and establish some web presence for it. Creating a Google Code project should be enough, as long as you have some deliverables available for download. That’s what I did.

More info, here.

[quote comment="11727"]How can I give a tweet with the source for example “Terminal”.
Default tweets have the source “web”, “IM”, “phone” or “Twitterific”[/quote]

You would have to get an API key.

How can I give a tweet with the source for example “Terminal”.
Default tweets have the source “web”, “IM”, “phone” or “Twitterific”

@Cosmin Ghiu:
You could build a “follower-thanking” bot as a cron job that:
1. Capture your latest list of followers like so:

curl --basic --user $u:$p http://twitter.com/statuses/followers/$u.xml > ~/.twitter-$u-followers.temp

(The > above should be a > char, but it’s getting caught by the WordPress)
2. If there is no ~/.twitter-$u-followers.xml, jump to step 7
3. Compare that to your previously saved* list of followers ~/.twitter-$u-followers.xml
4. Exit if no diff
5. Extract the screen_name field for each new follower
6. Sent each new follower a tweet like so:

for f in $new; do curl --basic --user $u:$p --data status="@$f Hey, thanks for following me. Where did you find out about me?" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml; done

7. mv -f ~/.twitter-$u-followers.temp ~/.twitter-$u-followers # *this satisfies step 3.

I’ll write a complete Bash script later, this is just off the top of my head. When I implement Step 5, I’m not sure if I want to just use sed or do a full blown xsltproc on it.

@SmartAssProducts: Agreed. It is indeed faster. Also check this post.

I’ve been using this method and just stumbled upon your page while looking for similar methods. One thing I want to point out is that–at least for me and the many other *nix geeks I know who also Twitter from a command line–it has nothing to do with “some headless unix machine that doesn’t have a proper browser…” We use it because it’s QUICKER! I have at least 15 very nice browsers, thank you, but NONE of them is as quick as typing: twitter [my message] (I named the shell script I wrote twitter.) So, yeah!