I Make Twitter-To-SMS Work for Canadians Again!

I Make Twitter-To-SMS Work for Canadians Again!

By Chantelle Oliver January 30, 2009 9 Comments

I haven’t had any death threats causing me to quit the social web. Nor have I been able to resist following brand new celebrity twitterers Demi Moore and Soleil Moon Frye. But that isn’t the worst news of the week: No matter what I do, I cannot get over being personally attacked by Twitter late last year.

You see, they took away my free SMS Twitter updates. They made me into a second-class Twitter citizen. I was ousted from the lifestream and became a treader of murky Twitter backwash instead.

But I have foiled you now Twitter!

In the interest of Canadian and European freedom and democracy (and because I have been writing academic theory all week and it makes me hate my useless self) I will now share with you a way to reinstate your SMS-to-Twitter updates. Please follow along:

Get a Gmail account. Forward your Twitter account email to this account.
On your inbox page select Settings
On your Settings page select Filters
On your Filters page select Create a new filter
On your Create a filters page enter “direct message” in the “Subject:” line
Select next step.
Check the box “Forward it to:”
Beside this checked box fill in your mobile phone’s email address. For Fido it is (phone# @fido.ca) and for Rogers it is (phone# @pcs.rogers.com)

This replaces what Twitter used to do and does not circumvent texting fees from your mobile provider. I’m not yet that benevolent and mighty.

Welcome back to pure and harmonious digital democracy Canadians!

Tagsdeath threat arrington, demi moore twitter, soleil moon frye twitter, twitter canada, twitter sms
Posted in Web 2.0 Museum

http://www.andrewcurrie.ca AC

You could also use your phone’s mobile browser to navigate to any one of the sites mentioned here:

http://is.gd/hPCo
http://www.refresh-events.ca/ Justin Kozuch

Interesting idea… and it seems to work fine with the iPhone. Thanks for posting this up!
http://www.chantelleoliver.com Chantelle Oliver

AC

There are many Twitter apps for the iphone -Tweetie being the current best – but they all need to be open and running to receive messages. The SMS service notifies your phone even when it is off so I get pretty little chimes whenever I receive a direct message. That makes me irrevocably plugged into freedom.Or you can customize it to get messages only from specific people or topics depending on how you use your filters.
http://www.lafferty.ca/ Rich

That doesn’t do what Twitter did with SMS — Twitter sent all the tweets from the people you followed and had “mobile” turned on, not just direct messages.

You can do what you’ve described here a lot easier just by putting your email-to-SMS address right in your Twitter account.
http://www.chantelleoliver.com Chantelle Oliver

Rich,

Twitter allowed you to select which specific people you received SMS updates from and which kinds of updates you received.

If you use your email-to-SMS address as your Twitter address you will lose all ability to expand upon what Twitter stared using your own filters. For example, I only want direct messages from certain people sent to SMS but then also certain subjects as well across all the people I follow. Plus you lose gmail’s powerful archiving ability (which I use with filters as a way of bookmarking important twitter links).
http://www.tweetboxlive.com/twitter-sms Rob from TweetBoxLive

Or you could use my new twitter sms service at http://www.TweetBoxLive.com

Have a few Canadian folk signed up since launch yesterday and so far so good.

@tweetboxlive
@rjstewart

All the people I really want to follow are on Facebook and since FB still has SMS to Canada AND a twitter sync app, I get SMS whenever my buds tweet.

On top of this I setup a fake account on FB for TorontoFS (a bot of mine) and my buddy Brian setup one for the @ttcu_community updates so people can still get SMS that way too!

OH… the @pcs.rogers.com DOESN’T WORK properly. The F#&$k thing sends you an SMS telling you to reply with “READ” before it will send you the message. Piece of poo!
http://www.kensfi.com Ken the tech

Is this working for Koodo mobile? I’m not talking only about Twitter but Facebook and other big social networks. Thanks!
http://www.chantelleoliver.com Chantelle Oliver

It should work with any mobile network that gives you an email address. But, as you can see, Canadian mobile networks basically suck.

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I Make Twitter-To-SMS Work for Canadians Again!

Tagsdeath threat arrington, demi moore twitter, soleil moon frye twitter, twitter canada, twitter sms Posted in Web 2.0 Museum

Tagsdeath threat arrington, demi moore twitter, soleil moon frye twitter, twitter canada, twitter sms
Posted in Web 2.0 Museum