Zen Twitter update – Removal from CPAN1

After a short email dialogue with Marc Mims of Net::Twitter, I’ve decided to remove Twitter::ZenTwitter from CPAN. He never requested that I do it, though I could understand from our dialogue that leaving my modules there would confuse things when he clearly looked forward to make Net::Twitter the default Perl interface to that service. This is entirely my opinion, none of this was even brought up in the emails. This short post is a quick explanation as to why the modules vanished from CPAN and from my directory there.

Zen::Twitter started as a script to find out which friends did not follow me back on Twitter. Not that I care, I have about 30 followers today and I know them all personally, so I never needed to know who did or didn’t follow me back…but it was meant as a followup to someone who posted a Ruby script to do the same some time ago.

Then I added functionality to find out which followers you had not befriended yet(the opposite direction). From there, to implementing nearly the full Twitter API it was a short hop – mainly because I had already implemented the User class, the HTTP request class and so on.

In the meantime, I had not even had a look at Net::Twitter. So…. After I released the Twitter::* modules and sent them to CPAN, Marc contacted me and asked if there was anything wrong with Net::Twitter. I said, of course, no, there wasn’t.

So then he asked why I hadn’t used Net::Twitter and chose instead to release my own modules. I felt bad that I had done all of this without giving it much thought or researching things further.

If nobody had said anything I’d probably have carried on without even knowing the other modules were there. I suppose CPAN is meant to accommodate everyone’s ideas so really we could have both coexist, but for something as trivial as Twitter I think I was just taking space.

Added that Doug Williams of Twitter didn’t think my libraries should be listed on http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries I can just conclude this whole Twitter programming thing wasn’t meant for me. Let’s move on. For anyone interested in hacking around with Twitter and Perl, I’m leaving these modules as they are frozen in time.