I love Emacs. I love using Twittering-mode to read Twitter from within Emacs. Only one thing bothered me about twittering-mode, and quickly browsing through its source-code showed me the fix. I also modified a tip on their page to give a text notification of new tweets. Just place these lines in your .emacs and enjoy. Modify as appropriate. Send me a tweet if you found this useful.
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/twittering-mode") ; if non-standard
(require 'twittering-mode)
(setq twittering-username "yourtwittername") ; replace
(setq twittering-notify-successful-http-get nil)
(add-hook 'twittering-new-tweets-hook (lambda ()
(let ((n twittering-new-tweets-count))
(format "%d New Tweet%s" n (if (> n 1) "s" "")))))
