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 Buzz, 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.