Gossip is a library that provides a consistent interface to "cronies" like Twitter, Campfire, email, and Jabber. It comes with scripts that use that library to do useful things. There is a detailed description[http://gossip.rubyforge.org].

There are nicely-formatted instructions[http://gossip.rubyforge.org/installation.html].

There is also a of the main classes[http://gossip.rubyforge.org/classes.html] to help you understand Gossip, plus instructions for new scripts[http://gossip.rubyforge.org/writing-new-scripts.html].