Twitter : Send free SMS messages to your friends

stephane

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 ! 🙂

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