The status of this project is: VAPORWARE. I’ve designed it but not implemented it. Initial release will be on 2008–10–01.
To get the code:
hg clone http://hg.red-bean.com/october/
None.
October is a Twitter client with no interface of its own. Instead, it presents Twitter as an IRC channel (or XMPP conference). When people ask me to explain what Twitter is all about, I like to use an analogy: Twitter is to IRC as blogs are to Usenet. We create a loose mesh of overlapping places rather than going to a hierarchy.
Blogs are available in XML, so I can syndicate them into my mailreader and read them there. Why not do the same with Twitter and my IRC client? As a geek, I have programs I really like for each purpose (sup, irssi), and prefer customizable client-side free software to, say, web-based email. Twitter maps really well to the concepts of IRC; interaction through the API is trivially read-write, unlike most blogs (at the moment).
October uses the same API as your typical desktop Twitter client. Twitter also has a notification service, where updates from a selected subset of users can be pushed to you in real time via either SMS or XMPP. To ward off any confusion: even though October speaks messaging protocols, is not in any way intended to be a replacement for Twitter’s existing XMPP-based services. Push notifications are only for people you really need to know about; the API is all of your Twitter. Totally different things.
Another difference between something like Twitter’s notifications and October is that October is not a bot. It is a full-fledged server, and Twitter users show up as users on the server, in your channel. Everything you can do, you do directly to those users or your channel.
That said, it would certainly be lovely if Twitter itself was an XMPP server that worked that way. You guys know where to find me if you want to hire someone to do it :-)