Following the recent announcement from Twitter and Vodafone in the UK, I thought it might be useful to share a tip for how I get free text alerts when some one @’s me on Twitter. I only know how to do this with Vodafone Ireland, but I’m sure it should be possible with many other operators in Ireland and worldwide.
1. A Vodafone.ie email account
Vodafone Ireland give all their customers a free email account. By default it’s you’re mobile number @vodafone.ie, e.g. [email protected]
To set yours up, log into vodafone.ie, and click on Vodafone Mail:
This should allow you to chose your own username (e.g. [email protected]).
2. Email Text Alerts.
Under the preferences you should see a “notification” option which offers to send you a text each time you get an email. Switch that on.
3. Notify.me
Visit notify.me and set up a new account using your newly created @vodafone.ie email address. You can skip through most of the set up proccess until you get to the sources tab.
Now you’ll need to open up a new window or tab and go to search.twitter.com. Search for replies to you. For example, my username is petertanham so I searched for @petertanham.
Once the search results appear you should see a box on the right hand side with a link to “feed for this query”. This link is the feed that will update anytime someone sends you a tweet on Twitter, and this is what we need as our notify.me source. You can right click on the link and select “copy link location” or click through and copy the url from the address bar.
Now go back to the source page on notify.me and paste in the url for your twitter feed. Once the feed is added make sure to click the email icon to activate email notification.
4. Fin
And that’s it! Now anytime someone replies to you on Twitter, you will get a text notification so you can log in and check it out. Personally, I leave this switched off most of the time because I’m always on Twitter (addict!), but when I know I’ll be away from a computer for a while I log into notify.me and toggle the email notification back on.
Other countries/networks
I haven’t got any login details to try this on other networks, but if you do please leave a comment letting us know if it works!
This also works for any service, for example Facebook or Bebo. For those just change your registered email address to your vodafone.ie address and you’ll get text alerts for new friends, comments on your profile etc.