Insprired by an article on ibm.com about using twitter from the command line, I wrote up a simple little script to get your friends updates.

Here it is:

$ curl -s -u username:password \
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml |
awk '/<text/ {
  gsub(/<\/*text>/,"");
  text = $0;
}
/screen_name/ {
  gsub(/ *<\/*screen_name>/,"");
  print $0;
  print text;
}'

All it does it is use cURL to grab the timeline from twitter. Then it passes it through awk to extract the name and text from your buddies. Simple and silly, yes?