I’m a pretty active Twitter user. I’ll be the first to admit that most of my tweets aren’t exactly thought provoking. I’m not going to win any awards for tweeting… but I do converse with quite a few people and I’m rather addicted to the service. The thing I like best about the service is their mobile capabilities. I use Twitter on my phone a lot because I’m not always near my computer. I can’t understate the coolness factor of that.
EDIT: April 2010
Please check out my new post about MyMentions. The service I started to send your Twitter replies to your mobile device via SMS. Thanks.
So Twitter works great with your phone, but there’s one problem… I don’t need to get EVERY update as a txt message. Sure there’s a select few that I have Twitter send each update to my phone, but I’m following a lot of people (273 at the time of this posting). I realize that some people are following a lot more than that, but to me, that’s a lot of tweets to keep track of 
. If I sent every update to my phone the thing would never stop.
Side note: Before I get any further I have to admit a sad truth: I don’t have an iPhone (gasp!) Maybe I’m not in the “cool crowd”. I have no idea how Twitter works on the iPhone, maybe it’s better. The biggest reason I don’t have an iPhone is because I have Verizon and I’m not really in the mood to switch providers. Currently I’m using an LG Voyager and I really like it. Perhaps Blackberry’s have a good interface for Twitter as well, but at the time I was getting my phone, none of the Blackberry’s appealed to me.
OK, glad that’s over with. So I’m using my phone to send tweets to Twitter and getting a few tweets from those I’m tracking. What would happen is that when I did make it to a computer, I’d find that I had a lot of @replies sitting there. DOH! I missed those. OK, so I need to send the replies to my phone so that I get notified when I’m not at the computer and I can actually “converse” with people (strange concept eh?).
Try #1: Twitter has already thought of this. Sweet! The service keeps getting better. They have this feature called “Track”. You send a command to track a word or phrase and it will notify you (in a number of different ways–I choose SMS). Perfect… only, when Twitter was going through it’s “growing pains” early in 2008, they took track down. They kept saying that it was coming back (and maybe it still is) but it hasn’t and it’s even been taken off their status now. Crap.
Try #2: I’m not the only one who’s missing this… there was a Twitter user named TweetTrak. This guy @RyanK wrote his own version. He set it up so that if you followed TweetTrak, then sent it a DM of what you wanted to track (i.e. @{your_username}) then it would send you a DM each time that was mentioned. Awesome! I just have to do that, send TweetTrak’s updates to SMS and I’m golden. Let me tell you, this worked LIKE A CHARM. It was great. Until… Twitter tagged him for sending too many DM’s and I guess they thought he was a spammer. Crappy because @RyanK had a kick ass fix and he was just helping people out… and “the man” shut him down. I understand Twitter’s need for staying on top of things, and I know SPAM is a growing problem on Twitter, but do a little research, check the guy out.
Try #3: Notify.me. Notify.me is a cool service that will do just that. Notify you of anything you want. It takes an RSS feed and sends it to whatever outlet you ask it to (even IM which is cool). OK, search.twitter.com results give you an RSS feed… let’s try that. It worked with only one problem. The delay was pretty bad at times. I’d get the replies, but they would be hours after the fact. And I would get the same reply multiple times (separated by several hours at times). Notify.Me is a good service, but for this specific instance, it’s not reliable enough.
Try #4: Yahoo! Pipes. I found a script on Yahoo! Pipes someone wrote to query search.twitter.com (kind of the same thing as Notify.Me). Then you can set an alert and have Yahoo! send you the results of the alert to your phone. That worked in the same manner as Notify.Me. I got the updates, but not timely enough.
Well… now what? I tried searching for more ways… then it hit me. Why don’t I just make my own? It can’t be that hard. All you need to do is: [1] Create an XML parser script (done-there are several out there already. I used this one), [2] give it my parameters, [3] tell it to text me (technically email my phone) any @replies, [4] set up a cron job so that it runs automatically, all the time. How easy is that? Then, just store all the results in a DB so that I don’t get the same reply more than once.
So anyway… that’s what I spent last night doing. And so far, I have to say… it works like a charm. Getting my @replies to my phone, and I even have it set to be quiet at specific times of the night so it’s not going off while I’m asleep.
I’ve never released any of my PHP scripts out into the world for others to use, but if this ends up working like I think it will… maybe this will be my first. I’m going to see how it goes… and maybe write an interface to set the variables (right now they’re all hard coded in–like my username and the blackout time).
If you have an interest in such a script please let me know and I’ll keep you up to date on how it’s going. Of course, you’ll need your own host (with PHP and MySQL) and the ability to automate the execution of the script somehow… but I won’t mind sending the code on over. I wish I could afford to host it, but sadly, that’s not the case.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter: @CantonDog
Cheers.
