Lee over at the Download Squad Squad posted a great little article about How to add Twitter and Facebook support to Pidgin for Windows.  The instructions work perfectly… unless you have a Google Talk-phobic firewall between you and the internet.  Guess who found that out the hard way?

Fortunately there is another plugin that can add Twitter support to Pidgin.  Lee notes the microblog-purple plugin can also help Pidgin tweet but isn’t quite as fully featured as the recommended pidgin-twitter plugin.  In practice this means it doesn’t show profile icons or other such niceties, but it has the advantage that it doesn’t rely on Google Talk so can get through the firewall in our office.  This makes the choice of plugin pretty simple for me.

To add Twitter without requiring a working Google Talk account:

1. Download the installer from the microblog-purple plugin project page.
2. Quit Pidgin if it is currently running
3. Run the microblog-purple plugin installer and walk through the typical installation process. Make sure the “Run Pidgin” checkbox is selected on the final dialog then click the Finish button.
4. When Pidgin restarts you will need to right click the Pidgin tray icon and choose plugins.  Find the Twitgin plugin in the list, ensure its entry is checked, then click Close. 
5. In the buddy list window select the Accounts\Manage menu option, then click the Add button. Select TwitterIM as the account protocol then supply your account details.  Most of the advanced options are fairly low level and may break the plugin functionality if you tinker with them so I’d suggest leaving those alone.  Click Save and you should now have a working Twitter.com buddy added to a new Twitter group in your buddy list.

Now I can tweet from the comfort of my own desktop without the HDD clutter and resource consumption of yet another instant messenger or microblogging client!