Bug 177906

Version:            (using Devel)
Installed from:    Compiled sources

There's a bunch of popular features found in other Twitter clients that
I'd like to see supported in KDE's Twitter technology:

- URL shortening: Many clients are providing the user with the ability
to shorten an URL without visiting services like tinyurl.com. Twitter
does shorten URLs automatically, but shortening the URL before sending
the tweet leaves the user with the ability to make better use of the
140 character limit of one tweet.

- Replies: Adressing an individual person is being handled through the
'@' prefix in Twitter. It would be nice to be able to convenienty
address a reply to a Tweet's sender that way by clicking his icon, or
 an icon alongside the Tweet.


- Retweet: Another popular mechanic is re-broadcasting another user's
Tweet to your own circle of followers by clicking an icon alongside it,
which copies it it into the tweet input field in the canonical form of
"RT: @theotherofthetweet histweet".

- Groups: As Twitter doesn't support user groups by itself, an important
feature for advanced users of Twitter is to be able to group his followers
into named groups, and filter for only their Tweets (cf. Tweetdeck).

- Subview for answers / direct messages: If a user is following a lot
of other people on Twitter, it's sometimes very hard not to miss the
most important Tweets, like Tweets that are directed to oneself (via
the answer feature or through a direct message). A view mode / filter
for only those messages would be very useful.

- Search: Integration of search.twitter.com into the client.

Talking the market for and of Twitter clients, the currently most
popular ones - which are popular for having introduced or supporting
the features described above -, like Tweetdeck and Twhirl, are all
based on Adobe's proprietary Air runtime. Being forced to use Twitter
by one's peer group thus means being forced to use Air, and I think
KDE with the Plasma framework and existing Twitter data engine has
good cards to come up with the first free alternative.

Certainly some of the above may best be left for some sort of Advanced
Twitter Plasmoid in Extragear, although both plasmoids could still
share the same engine. That said, there's an emerging base line of
features for desktop Twitter clients and it's a good idea to be ready
to meet it even with the regular Plasmoid, I think.