Comment 3 for bug 520238

@Arturo: it's not that simple. The message, reply, and private streams each use one request. That means Gwibber makes three requests on a Twitter account per refresh. If you did a refresh every single minute, you would exceed the rate limit.

Twitter is currently developing its own streaming APIs for real-time messaging, but it's not fully functional yet and it doesn't appear to support single-user use cases at this time. When Twitter's streaming API has matured to the point where it's practical to use in Gwibber, we will adopt it.

Identi.ca has an XMPP bridge that might possibly be able to facilitate real-time communication, but it will require further investigation. My plan is to use XMPP to determine when new messages are available and then force a refresh of the Identi.ca account. That's something that I won't be able to experiment with until after Lucid/Gwibber 2.30.