[How to] Send / Receive Tweets via local SMS!

Tweeting is more fun when you use it on the go from your mobile devices. But, one thing which Twitter lacks is its support for SMS updates. In India, Twitter has a tie-up with Bharti Airtel but the users of other connection providers just had to wait. There are work arounds for this by sending an SMS through US / UK based carriers which would be treated as an International SMS and would obviously be costly. Here is a simple solution for you to send / receive Tweets via local SMS. There are no special charges for this but your carrier’s standard messaging rates apply. Image courtesy: DateAGadget Sending Tweets
Smstweet is a simple free service which lets you to post updates to Twitter for free. After authenticating with Twitter, provide your mobile number to Smstweet. Smstweet acts a gateway for messages. It interprets the messages and forwards the same to your authenticated Twitter account. Start tweeting by sending a message, 'TWT <your message>' to the numbers of Smstweet. Register here. Easy, isn’t it?

Receiving Tweets
There is no single complete service for receiving tweets. Here is a home-grown solution for you. Let me break down the solution into a three step process.

1. Get your Twitter RSS feed. Twitter pages are RSS enabled. To get the RSS feed URL of your updates and your friends’ updates, go to Twitter’s home page and grab the RSS feed URL from the right bottom of the page.

2. Unlock your password protected Twitter feed. Twitter feed is password protected which means that only the owner of the feed will be able to use it. To Unlock this feed for using it with other readers / aggregators, use services like Feedburner or Yahoo Pipes. Refer to Amit’s blog post on unlocking the feeds.

3. Create an SMS channel for the public feed. Now that the feed is ready, the next step is to push the updates from this RSS feed to the mobile devices. Google SMS Channel, a Google India lab product, does exactly the same. Given a feed, it broadcasts the updates to all the subscribers via SMS. Create a new SMS channel with the unlocked feed URL created in step-2. Check out the various delivery options available for your SMS channels. Choose the one which would suit you and you are done. :-) Note: Google SMS channel is a lab product and not a complete one. Hence, there might be outages at times.

Happy tweeting!! If you know any other simple solution to this, share across by commenting over here.

-- Varun