In August 2008, Twitter killed SMS updates for everybody outside of the U.S., Canada, and India. Users in the U.K. can now only send messages from their phones, but can’t receive them anymore. The developers of Twe2 got frustrated by this and decided to take matters into their own hands. Thanks to Twe2’s free service, you can now receive Twitter messages on your mobile phone close to anywhere in the world.
Features
By default, Twe2 will send you an SMS whenever you receive a direct message or a reply. In order to finance this service, Twe2 appends a short ad to all of its SMS messages.
Twe2, whosedevelopers are also responsible for the popular FriendDeck app, has added a number of interesting features to its service that Twitter itself never offered. You can, for example, use the service to receive a message whenever a certain keyword appears in your stream, and you can even use relatively complex search queries.
In order to keep your Twitter SMS stream manageable, Twe2 lets you set the notification frequency (up to 100 messages per hour), and you can also specify if you only want Twe2 to send you messages at specific times during the day or only on certain days of the week.
Thanks to these features, Twe2 is even an interesting service for those of us who live in countries where Twitter’s own SMS service is still available. Twe2 also promises that users in the U.S. will get a few extra features in order to distinguish the service from Twitter’s own SMS updates.
One problem with Twe2, however, is that the service doesn’t have access to Twitter’s firehose feed, so that it can often take a while before it notices a new message and forwards it to you.
OAuth Coming Soon
Twe2 was approved by Twitter to test the company’s forthcoming support oAuth, though this is not available yet. For now, you still have to provide Twe2 with your Twitter login and password.
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