Wishlist: Twitter Notifications for @ Replies

May 3, 2008 Technology

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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)?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • Derrick Kwa

    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.

  • from the twitter blog yesterday :)  http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-wor...
     
    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

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

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