Gwibber on Ubuntu 10.04 issues with FiOS

I just upgraded one of my machines to the latest and greatest Ubuntu because I plan on taking it on the road later this week. After I got everything set up, I fired up Gwibber, my favorite Twitter client on Linux. Immediately, I started running into problems. I couldn't get Gwibber to load any new tweets. There seem to be several people who are experiencing this issue with Gwibber, but their troubles are related to the language settings. That was not the case for me.

I did some digging by firing up Gwibber in a terminal:

$> gwibber-service -o -d

This is what I got:

	Gwibber Dispatcher: DEBUG <twitter:receive> Performing operation
	Traceback (most recent call last):
	File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/network.py", line 32, in __init__
	self.curl.perform()
	error: (6, 'name lookup timed out')
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR Failed to communicate with http://api.flickr.com/services/rest?username=eedrummer&api_key=36f660117e6555a9cbda4309cfaf72d0&nojsoncallback=1&method=flickr.people.findByUsername&format=json
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR Failed to parse the response, error was: No JSON object could be decoded
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR <flickr:images> Operation failed
	Traceback (most recent call last):
	File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/network.py", line 32, in __init__
	self.curl.perform()
	error: (6, 'name lookup timed out')
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR Failed to communicate with https://twitter.com/statuses/home_timeline.json?count=200&since_id=14197621957
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR Failed to parse the response, error was: No JSON object could be decoded
	Gwibber Dispatcher: ERROR <twitter:receive> Operation failed

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Gwibber wasn't refreshing because it was timing out on the DNS lookup. I have Verizon FiOS as an ISP. FiOS having terrible DNS seems to be a problem. I switched over to Google DNS and every thing is snappy and working properly. If you're using Gwibber on FiOS and having issues, try this out. It may save you an hour or three.

Gwibber, or whatever library it is using for network communication, picked a pretty short timeout, but this is pretty lame. Verizon really needs to step it up here. People will perceive FiOS as slow because it takes forever to look up an IP, even though the network is pretty quick in my experience.