Twitterers: Cut your text messages in half!
// November 22nd, 2008 // 10 Comments » // Brad's Life, Technology, Uncategorized
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(This is my personal blog. Didn’t want to send it to my regular subscribers, but you should check that out too.)
With my iPhone, it KILLS me to pay $5 a month for 200 texts, with email/twitter/etc at my fingertips.
I finally brought my wife into the 21st century this week and signed her up for a text messaging plan. BUT, I didn’t want to upgrade my plan and pay more. Since I use Twitter so much, I turned to it to handle this issue and serve as the middleman for text conversations between my wife and I.
Here’s how you can get your non-tweeting significant other to utilize Twitter and cut the amount of messages you have to send to 0 while you use the web instead.
10 Steps to Twitter Texting
1) I set my wife up with a twitter account and linked it to her mobile device, a Motorola L2.
2) I set a new contact in her phone called ‘Brad Text’, with the number as ‘40404′.
3) I then send ‘off’ ONCE to ‘Brad Text’. This shuts off twitter updates via text. Otherwise, she would get every single update I send. Not only would that blow her 200 text limit and the point of saving texts, but would be information overload… even for my wife.
4) Now that I have sent ‘off’ to ‘Brad Text’ once, the phone will then only receive direct messages.
5) I set her Twitter account as private, so only I can see her twitter updates.
6) I taught her to send a text message to ‘Brad Text’ whenever she wants to send me a text message. This ‘text message’ goes to her twitter page, where I then see it in my regular stream.
7) If you follow LOTS of people and don’t want these important messages to get lost in the stream, or if you don’t want those tweets to be public in the event this person eventually ’sees the light’ and begins to utilize Twitter for what it’s mainly for… teach them how to direct message you. We’ll get there, but for now… baby steps…..
When I teach her how to DM me (which also sends me an email notification, so.. double alert!), it is as easy as her sending a text message to her ‘Brad Text’ contact that says ‘d bradjward hello you are great.’
9) Whenever I want to send her a text message back, I just send a direct message to her. ‘d username hey, you’re pretty awesome too.’
10) She gets the text message on her phone. The DM doesn’t go out to my followers. Just her, on her phone. (She would get the email too.) And then when she responds, it starts all over.
There you have it.
It’s kind of cool because it also archives our text messages.. not that it’ll be fun to look back on emails of…
‘what is for supper?’
‘porkchops’
‘again?’
…but hey, you never know. So that’s how we do it, and that’s how our conversations count as half as many text messages on our AT&T plan.
Leave a comment if you have questions!
