Twitter : Send free SMS messages to your friends

If you don’t know yet about Twitter, you might want to have a look at my previous article about it.
One of its neat features is the (previously written about) ability to send direct messages to your friends.

This feature will let you easily send free SMS from your computer to any of your friends.

To enjoy this free SMS service, you’ll need to follow those few easy steps :

  1. Create an account on Twitter, and then log in
  2. Invite your friends, so that they’ll create an account as well. You’ll only be able to send free SMS messages to your Twitter-friends if they set up their cell phone in their Twitter account.
  3. Have them configure their account so that direct messages sent to them will be delivered to their cell phone
    1. Look on the right hand sidebar, the “send notifications to” lets you do this
    2. Ensure that the cell phone configuration is ok too, that is “notifications” are on for the cell phone
  4. Start sending them direct messages; they’ll get them as SMS on their cell phones :
    1. You can do this either through the web interface
    2. or through IM (for example GTalk or AIM) if you configured it. Basically you’ll add a special buddy (twitter@twitter.com for GTalk for example), and when you’ll send him a message, it will interact with your twitter. This is a way to update your Twitter status, but there is a lingo which will let you send direct messages. If you want to send a message to a user whose twitter account is my_friend, then send the following message to the twitter buddy : d my_friend hello there !

That’s really this simple ! 🙂

Worth reading :

14 thoughts on “Twitter : Send free SMS messages to your friends”

  1. Pingback: » Scripting Twitter with cURL « provided by Tech@Sakana

  2. to bad you need to fill in your mobile number into the twitter system (linked to your account)
    that’s a system i dislike i still like to have some privacy

  3. klaas : you don’t have to fill in your mobile phone number to use twitter through web or instant messaging. You’ll need to do that only to be able to use the SMS features.

  4. hehe that i understood but why would i use twitter if everyone is using msn (don’t get me wrong i don’t like msn neither) the only thing i would use twitter for is to send sms to people for free (cause i’m living in belgium and paying around 0.125euro per sms)…

    btw Stéphane nice show here keep it up interesting page..

  5. klass : in my opinion msn and twitter are really two different beasts… msn to chat with your buddies, twitter to leave a trail of what you’ve been doing.

    Now of course this is not so simple because there are many ways to find new uses for twitter, and you are right, many people use it like an IM (by pushing messages with a “@” like “@stephane : the movie was great” and such … but honestly, I don’t think twitter is the right tool for this !)

    By the way, thanks for your visits on my blog 😉

  6. Pingback: Perl+Twitter : Getting @mentions from command line - Tech@Sakana – A sysadmin’s blog
  7. Pingback: Scripting Twitter with Perl + LWP - Tech@Sakana – A sysadmin’s blog

  12. Hi,

    You may also check how to send SMS from Twitter with Ozeki NG SMS Gateway:
    sms-integration.com/p_103-twitter-to-sms-sms.html

    BR

Comments are closed.