This post has now been migrated to ThoughtAsylum.com.
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Tweet from a dumb phone
22/07/2009There are lots of Twitter clients out there for smart phones, but you can also tweet from a ‘dumb’ phone. The trick is to use a service like TwitSay or TwitterFone. Once you register, these services give you a local telephone number to call. You can then record a short voice message.
- If you use TwitSay, then your message will be held as an audio recording on TwitSay and a URL will be posted to your Twitter feed.
- If you use TwitterFone then a transcription takes place and the resulting text is posted to your Twitter feed. TwitterFone also allows you a few additional options such as being able to listen to your Twitter feed being read to you and then being able to post responses and direct messages through the same audio transcription system.
It’s an interesting alternative interface to Twitter and one with several benefits in terms of accessibility – both in a disability sense and an availability of technology sense. Even with a smart phone you could take advantage of these services if for example you have voice dialling enabled … not that I’d recommend tweeting whilst driving.
Interestingly both services refer only to mobile phones. I do wonder if a land line would work too. I can’t see any reason that it wouldn’t unless you have caller ID sending off or the services are actively blocking them. You would however need to be able to receive a text message to the land line for activation validation purposes. however many operators offer an SMS to audio service so even that shouldn’t really be an issue for most people.
Now I want to know when I can have a transcription take place on my phone without using a service so that I can just dictate a tweet (or an SMS) and not even have to pay for the local call – just make use of the data plan instead.

Drip Feed
07/01/2009Did a bit more tweaking of the Yahoo Pipe construct that puts the FlagIT blog and Twitter feed together onto the Reboot IT blog. The output now combines the two feeds in a chronological order.
One thing I have noticed is that it takes quite a while to actually refresh the RSS feed it produces. I’ve watched the lag in the time it takes Yahoo Pipe to refresh the feed even though the debugger view seems to pick up the change straight away. Additionally the WordPress widget to pull in the RSS feed seems to take a little while to update. I’m guessing that they’re both on a cycle and that they can end up significantly out of phase so it may take some time to see the feed update on occasion.

Micro-blog Integrated with Twitter
06/01/2009This is the first post in the Flag IT blog. This blog is a micro-blog for my main blog Reboot IT. The entries from this micro-blog are fed into the Reboot IT Twitter Feed via the use of a Yahoo Pipe aggregation.
Assuming this all fits together as I expect Reboot IT’s micro blog RSS feed should receive my Twitter posts along with these Flag IT posts.