Provide ability to Follow a user

@arky you are right, latest version of gwibber (2.29.1) shipped in Lucid does not have this option and would be nice if this feature could be added in the next release.

Upstreamed so triaged. Thanks for helping us make ubuntu better.

I've got a branch which adds a 'Follow this person' MessageAction (with the actual feature only supported by the twitter service for now), but since that action doesn't make sense on messages from people whom you already follow, I'm planning to try and exclude the menu item in these cases.

AIUI it'd be easy to do so by overriding the include() method, but I'm wondering if it wouldn't be prohibitively expensive given that it might have to query twitter to find out whether or not you already follow the message author. This won't be a problem if we already have that information cached somewhere, though.

Thanks, Guilherme! I'm going to include this in version 3.

To follow a person, just type "follow <Nick>", without the @, as if you would send a new tweet.

Would it be a separate UI element? Gwibber is graphical client for microbloging. it isn't IRC.

@W.Bourgeois - That works, thank you! Still, it would be common sense to have a "Follow" button in Gwibber. Regards, Rykel. identi.ca (rykel98)

We want these abilities when mouse cursor hovers an avatar:
1. follow/unfollow this person
2. block this person

Looks a trivial fix, will look into this one soon.

Bilal, I have a fix for this bug on the branch linked here (lp:~salgado/gwibber/bug-519262), but AFAICT it was never merged into trunk even though it was accepted for 3.0.

Guilherme: Propose a merge then.

My branch doesn't seem to merge cleanly into trunk anymore and I won't have time to solve these conflicts, so somebody would have to do that before proposing a merge.

I'll take a look at this. The change looks minimal, however trunk has gone through a lot of modifications because of oauth and everything.

Ok, I've gone through the changes. Merging this 'Follow user' is rather trivial. However, there is no control over who we already follow and how to un-follow.

I am thinking about implementing 'FriendsManager' and 'FollowersManager' or something similar. But it will be a pain to keep it in sync with Twitter. Perhaps syncing it once a day/week? and per request should be good enough. Then checking if we follow one user in particular or not should be relatively trivial. Since manager would already implement that.

However, I would like to consult with one of the 'senior developers' before doing that. :)

I guess, FriendsManager and FollowerManager would be a good idea, Twitter supports this - see http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/friends/ids.

Yet, there are two more problems:
1) Other services. Need to investigate if other services allow friends - Facebook and Identi.ca are top-priority.
2) Rate limiting. Definitely, a per-request update of friends and followers would be the best implementation, but pretty soon we would hit the ceiling of requests and the whole stream would not be updated. Maybe, a separate update timer for friends update?

Identi.ca implemented Twitter API and it is basically the same. I wanted to check what the status is, but it seems that I am failing at googling trying to find identi.ca API docs?! Facebook, well I'd rather not dive into that. ;)

Rate limiting could be a problem. I would prefer separate timers for standard updates, @replies and direct messages. Per request update would hit the ceiling only if user would click on it too much. Same thing happens if user adds five more streams and keeps hitting refresh.

I would update Friends list only when starting the service and once or twice per day, max. Same goes for Followers list.

Identi.ca API are documented here - http://status.net/wiki/Twitter-compatible_API. Seems that friend/followers are used as in Twitter, so the code should be almost the same.
AFAIK Facebook friends actions are already implemented in facelib.py, but not used in Gwibber for now.
Still, even Twitter implementation would be enough - other protocols could be added later.

I guess, it would be better to add a new configuration option for friends/followers requests - user customizations are always good.

I am not sure how other Twitter clients like TweetDeck handle this, but it keeps track of the followers.. what you could also do is check for the followers once when the client is started, and let it refresh when changes occur, like when you follow a new person.

Tweetdeck allows you to follow the from the profile view. Twitter iphone client gives you follow/unfollow button in the reply, reweet bar.

Gwibber doess alllow follow/unfollow from the profile view, since about 3.1.6 or so.

How is this fixed if I still can't with version 3.4.2?