Wishlist: Twitter Notifications for @ Replies

May 3, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! And if there's anything else I can do for you, feel free to drop me a line.

Here’s a feature I’d want on Twitter, a way to turn on notifications only for @ replies. Twitter provides the ability to turn on notifications to either your whole timeline, or to DMs only. I’d like one for @ replies.

Why? Because sometimes I’m having conversations on Twitter, and I need to go offline. Or sometimes I Twitter from my phone, and would love to get notifications about people who reply to me. It’s more focused. Rather than a hundred SMSes a minute, it’d be much more useful to only get notified of conversations I’m involved in. Or to at least get the option.

I’ve got a rough idea of a possible way it can be implemented as a 3rd party. Twitter provides notifications for DMs. So I’m thinking, would it be possible to create a bot account to do something like this. You follow it, it auto-follows you back. Then it monitors the @replies RSS pipe (created by Andrea Vascellari, referencing TweetScan) and just duplicates the RSS updates as DM to you. That’s just one possibility, and it should be highly possible to create, right?

What do you guys think? Am I the only one who wants this feature? And anyone want to help create something like this (because I don’t have much experience with scripting)?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Category Posted in Technology | Email This Post
Trackback URL: http://derrickkwa.com/archives/wishlist-twitter-notifications-for-replies/trackback/

Previous: Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep | Next: Lessons from a long walk

4 Responses to “Wishlist: Twitter Notifications for @ Replies”

Steve
Posted: May 11th, 2008 (1 weeks ago) at 8:02 am
1

yeah I have wanted this for a while. Maybe I will just build that bot..

Derrick Kwa
Posted: May 11th, 2008 (1 weeks ago) at 11:59 am

Author Comment

That’d be cool, Steve. Let me know if/when you finish building the bot, yeah? =).

Steve
Posted: May 14th, 2008 (4 days ago) at 10:43 am

from the twitter blog yesterday :) http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html

Tracking You
Another question I get is how to get the equivalent of the Replies tab (@replies to you, especially from people you don’t follow) over SMS. The work-around for this (for some people) is just to Track your name. E.g., I send ‘track ev’ and get a message every time someone mentions @ev. This is not ideal, because Track currently ignores the “@” symbol, so if you have username that is common, you’ll get lots of irrelevant stuff. We plan to fix that. (Also, yes, we will get the replies tab on m.twitter.com. Soon.)

Steves last blog post..SQL Server Reporting Services: Quick way to get 10 digit year (all the zero’s) using String.Format

Derrick Kwa
Posted: May 14th, 2008 (4 days ago) at 11:11 pm

Author Comment

Thanks. Yes, I do track my name. But the thing is, there doesn’t seem to be turn on notifications just for that keyword. (or if there is, I haven’t found it). And that’s the problem for me.

SexyComments by BorkWeb