This is the first chance I’ve had to really experience Twitter via SMS, and it’s not been much fun. Usually I’m logged in on IM somewhere, and the inbound messages cause little distraction. Maybe it’s indicative of how ‘connected’ I’ve been recently that I’ve maybe only had one or two texts from Twitter prior to this weekend. And I recently started to use some of the higher traffic feeds.
I ought, of course, have MGTalk running on the Nokia, but the memory on this phone is so small that if I start the camera it tends to shut all the other apps down, so effectively the IM is out.
So it’s been a beeping weekend. I can’t even customise the alert tone based on sender. I could turn it off, but I don’t want to lose it entirely. Maybe it’s my phone’s fault for not having customisable SMS alerts. But I do wonder if it’s worth the probably considerable expense to the Twitter project to enable SMS alerts? (On a similar note this week, I was in the bizarre situation of receiving Twits from James C whilst going and buying us both a beer. I remarked then that proximity detection would save some money).
Now that I’ve been on the receiving end of Twitter via SMS, I’m reconsidering how useful it is. I’ve had some ideas for Twitter apps that would be really cool on IM, but an absolute disaster if someone got them via SMS.
I’ll have a fiddle with my Twitter settings when I get back, but I suspect I might be deciding to turn SMS Twits off….