Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [30]
You’re given an alphabetical code and instructed to text this code from your phone to 40404.
4. Send the code from your phone as a text message to 40404.
You’ll receive a text message from Twitter confirming that your device has been verified and SMS alerts have been enabled.
5. Refresh the page until you see your cellphone number listed.
Now, you can choose to have text-message notifications on, off, or direct messages only. You can also opt to have them turned off during a specific time (say, while you’re usually sleeping or at work).
6. Turn on SMS device updates for your Twitter account and then click Save.
In the Device Updates drop-down list, select On if you want to receive tweets as text messages on your phone or direct messages if you would like to receive only your direct messages. Then click Save.
7. (Optional) Select a sleep period when you prefer not to receive updates and click Save.
If you’re enabling device updates, but you don’t want them coming in 24 hours a day, under the heading Sleep, select the Turn Off Updates During These Hours check box and select the hours during which you don’t want to receive updates on your phone. Click Save when you’re done.
8. Choose whose device updates you want to see.
Click Home and then click Following (or just go to www.twitter.com/friends) to view a list of the people you follow. When device updates are on for your account, you’ll see toggle buttons next to each person on your following list.
Make sure that your cellphone carrier has an unlimited text-messaging plan — or that you’re willing to pay for a lot of extra texts — before setting Twitter device notifications to On. Twitter doesn’t charge for texts, but your carrier might! Laura has unlimited texting even though she doesn’t receive any text updates from Twitter, because she loves to use the text commands to add people, send tweets, and send direct messages.
You don’t automatically receive device updates from everyone you follow on Twitter. You have to manually turn these device updates on for each individual. To check and see whether any given individual is set to device updates ON or OFF:
1. Go to that user’s profile on Twitter.
You can access a user’s profile by clicking the user’s @username in one of his tweets.
2. Just under their avatar photo look for the device updates status.
The red dash and OFF means you won’t get this person’s tweets as SMS messages even when SMS device updates are turned ON for your account. The green check and ON means that you will.
3. Turn an individual’s device updates on or off.
First, enable all device updates on your phone. Then on Twitter.com, select your Following link (www.twitter.com/friends), and you can toggle Device updates On and Off for many users at a time right on one page.
Of course, you can also control this setting using SMS on your phone. Send an on username message to turn Device updates on and off username to turn them off.
If you forget who you’ve set to receive mobile device updates from, you can always go to the list of people you’re following by clicking Following (see Chapter 3 for more instructions) to find that information. It’s listed underneath the person’s username. If you turn device updates off, you won’t be able to view it, but the information is still there and will reappear when device updates are turned back on for your account.
RSS feeds
You can receive updates from Twitter via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, much like you would for any blog or news Web site that you follow.
An RSS feed delivers the content to you so that you don’t have to constantly be logged into the Web page. You just need a way to see the feed: Most people use something called a feed reader. You don’t have to know much about technology to get one of these and set it up. You can choose from many feed readers out there, but we recommend Google Reader (http://reader.google.com). You already have one of these accounts if you use Gmail, Picasa, iGoogle, or other Google-owned services. Follow Google’s pretty easy