Hacking Twitter (Not Really)

Well, not really hacking Twitter… but to the uninitiated you will look like a hard core hacker when you do this simple trick. What you need is an application called cURL, which you can get here. It works on just about every operating system from DOS to Windows to Linux to Mac OS X. It’s a command line tool that lets you transfer files using URL syntax. What that means? I don’t know.

Once you’ve installed cURL, you can open up a terminal and input this line of text (I’m using a Mac for this but the command is the same for Linux as well):

curl -u username:password -d status=”Status goes here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

You should see some text pop up once you’ve input the command; after that simply go check Twitter to make sure that your status update posted. I don’t believe this program is pre-installed on Windows; Linux distributions may or may not have it, but I do know that OS X 10.6 seems to have had it preinstalled.
So there you go - posting Twitter updates from a command line interface. Does that make you an elite hacker? Of course not, but it is impressive to people who never use a command line for anything.

On a side note, if it gives you an error and only displays the first word of your update with a quotation mark, you may need to change the quotation mark from smart quotes to straight quotes.