Posts Tagged ‘text’

Twext.me Now Uses OAUTH To Access Twitter Accounts

December 2nd, 2009 - Jeff Turner

When we first launched Twext.me, Twitter was in the early stages of their OAUTH launch. There were a few hitches when we made our first attempts to initiate, so we decided to simply require users to input their Twitter username and password.

The recent surge in Twitter spam has people feeling sketchy about giving anyone their password, so we decided to go ahead and implement this more secure way of accessing your Twitter account. We will never see your password. This is a good thing.

Convert your existing Twitter accounts inside Twext.me

You may convert your existing Twitter accounts by logging into Twext.me and clicking on the “Manage Twitter Accounts” tab. This will take you to a page that will look like this:

Click on Re-Authorize with Twitter. You will then be taken to twitter to give Twext.me authorization to access your data. We use this access to get a better look at the data inside your account. We will never send any messages out via your account. Ever. The authorization on the Twitter side will look like this:

When you set up a new account, the process is similar, but the page will look slightly different. The username field is required so we can help you easily keep track of multiple Twitter accounts, should you choose to do so.

Many have requested this in the past, so we’re happy it’s now live. Hopefully this will encourage more to use this free service. And remember, if you want your text messages to come via standard SMS, once you’ve set up your accounts, just text TWEXTME to 41411.

Tags: apps, mentions, SMS, text, twextme, Twitter
Posted in Blog, Proprietary Products, Twext.me | 2 Comments »

Twext.me – Twitter Mentions To SMS Text

April 17th, 2009 - Jeff Turner

Today we launched Twext.me to an extremely limited group of testers.

Ben Martin, the Zen Master of Association Social Networking, approached me a few weeks ago about a need he was filling with a mashup of several different online services. The need was simple. Ben wanted to be notified via SMS Text message anytime there was a mention of @bkmcae on Twitter. Since this is a seemingly logical function not supported on Twitter, I was surprised something like this didn’t exist in the wild. After some research, we determined there was really only one service similar, Tweettrak. The difference, Tweettrack sends your notice via direct message to your twitter account.

As a heavy user of Twitter, I know having mentions sent to me via direct message is not an optimal solution. I want my private direct messages to be distinct from my mentions. So, on Wednesday, April 15 we began to build Twext.me and two days later we have it up for testing.

I’ve had it running since this afternoon and I can already tell some major changes are going to be required to make this a service that heaver twitter users might find valueable. My phone was bombarded by text messages today. I did a quick look and in the last 24 hours, Ben has had 42 mentions on Twitter. In that same time period, I ( @respres ) have 90 mentions. I haven’t talked to Ben yet, but each mention coming in as an individual SMS Text was a bit overwhelming for me. So, right off the bat, we have a few changes to make.

Here are two things we’ll need to do pretty quick:

A pause button. Twext.me needs a pause button or a way to schedule when you want the updates to occur. For example, I don’t want to get updates while I’m at my computer and able to engage directly with Twitter.
A digest option. If 6 people retweet the same information, I don’t need six differnt text messages. Even if the information is different, I’m really only looking for an alert that indicates that I should go take a look.

I know the service will be a lot more valuable to me when those two items are incorporated into the site. Stay tuned. More to come.

Tags: mentions, SMS, text, Twitter
Posted in Blog, Product Development, Proprietary Products, Twext.me | 12 Comments »

An Audio/Visual VoiceCloud Example

June 5th, 2008 - Jeff Turner

Here is the text exactly as it was transcribed and sent to my email:

“Hi I’m leaving a message for myself so you can see the accuracy f the voicecloud service. I wasn’t convinced about this service until someone left me a very lengthy email today and the transcript came in almost perfectly. I was extremely impressed so I thought what I’d do is try and call myself from my own phone, leave a message and put this up on others so that you can see for yourself listening and reading the transcript as it came in through my email and I’ll explain more about the service when I post it, thanks for listening. .. Voice-to-Text by VoiceCloud“

VoiceCloud says it is “the premier provider of true, next-generation, real-time voice-to-text transcription services.” You can judge for yourself. http://www.voicecloud.com/

I am enjoying the service, even though I have a form of visual voicemail built into the iPhone. I like the notices sent to my email and being able to quickly read what the voicemail was about. It has come in handy when I’m not in a position to pick up the phone. Or just don’t want to!