SuccessWhale is a web-based Twitter and Facebook client written in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. It’s a multi-column client that will work just the same in any browser – even IE6. (And as far as I know it’s unique in that respect.) You can also use it while on networks that block twitter.com. :) It’s free to use by anyone, has no advertising, and source code is available.

Visit SuccessWhale.com to try it out!

Features

• You can add as many Twitter and Facebook accounts as you like, displaying data from each, and you can choose which to post to every time.
• SuccessWhale has a multi-column view, which can be scrolled through if you want more than will sensibly fit on your screen. Many columns are available for each Twitter and Facebook account you register, including ones that combine notifications from all your accounts.
• SuccessWhale is integrated with my Twitter pastebin, Twixt. Enter a reply longer than 140 characters into the box in SuccessWhale, and it will be shortened automatically using Twixt. SuccessWhale also displays the contents of Twixt posts inline, and expands short URLs.
• You can use SuccessWhale from places where twitter.com and facebook.com are blocked. To do so, you’ll have to log in from a computer that can see the sites first, then click “Accounts” in the top-right and create yourself a SuccessWhale account. You’ll then be able to log in using that password from any computer.
• You can maintain a “banned phrases” list, which will hide tweets containing certain phrases — great if you’ve got too many friends that spam their Foursquare check-ins to Twitter.

Screenshot

Successwhale 2 Screenshot (click for full size)

Status

SuccessWhale is complete, released software, and currently stands at version 2.0.1. It’s used by around 50 people — including myself — as their main Twitter and Facebook client, and a number of sites around the internet have used the source code to integrate SuccessWhale into their own sites. As far as I’m aware it has no bugs, but if you find any or would like to request any new features for the next version, you can contact me on Twitter (I’m @tsuki_chama), or via my contact form. If you’d like to submit bug reports and feature requests directly into my GitHub issue tracker, please register an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

SuccessWhale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. You can get the source code from GitHub here.

This includes all the third-party code on which SuccessWhale depends, including twitteroauth, the Facebook PHP SDK, jQuery, the jQuery Form Plugin, the jQuery BlockUI Plugin, the jQuery Impromptu Plugin, the jQuery Force Redraw Plugin, the jQuery breakly Plugin, the jQuery “put cursor at end” Plugin, and the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. (Certain parts of the SuccessWhale download are thus licenced under the MIT licence, which is more permissive than and compatible with the GPL licence that SuccessWhale itself uses.)

Installation

To run your own copy of SuccessWhale, check out the source from GitHub and load it on to a web server that supports PHP (v4 and above) and, optionally, MySQL (any version). Follow the instructions in INSTALL.TXT, which will include editing config.php to enter your own settings.

Then just navigate to index.php, follow the instructions on screen, and you should be up and running!

Development/Test Version

Version 2.1 of SuccessWhale will bring support for more services such as LinkedIn and Google+, along with addressing a number of more minor feature requests by users. Development is underway. You can try it out on the test server, and get the bleeding edge source if you want to play with it.

The test server will break frequently without warning, var_dump() stuff you don’t want the world to see, and may do weird unexpected things. If you ask for help or report a bug with it, I will probably be sarcastic at you.

Thanks to…

• @abraham for writing twitteroauth, a PHP implementation of the Twitter OAuth API. SuccessWhale uses twitteroauth as its backend.
• @tikakino for the short URLs and Twixt expansion code, and for my introduction to jQuery.
• @aefaradien for hosting successwhale.com in the early days, and for many bug reports.
• @pixify for SuccessWhale version 2′s OSX-inspired button style.
• @glyphish for the icons to match the above button style.
• Ibrahim Faour, for modifying the Facebook API docs in response to my question on StackOverflow.