This project was inspired by this article, where the author explains how to fetch your status message from Twitter to an Arduino and show it on a LCD placed at your office door. At the end, a few improvements are mentioned and the complete implementation can be found here. I wanted do basically the same, but did not have the Arduino Ethernet Shield. Instead, I used an embedded system that was in our lab doing nothing.
Twitcurl, library for Twitter API's.
Perl, for the main script.
Perl module: http://search.cpan.org/~grantm/XML-Simple-2.18/lib/XML/Simple.pm XML::Simple, so you can parse the XML file.
Sign in to your Twitter account. Go to settings → applications → developers → create new application. Complete the information screen, copy the consumer key and consumer secret. You'll need it next.
This will download a XML file with the response from Twitter.
Visit the website and copy the PIN. Check the XML file saved to see the response from Twitter.