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PROJECTS | Noah Brier

Tweemail: Twitter to Email

October 29, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 11 COMMENTS

I, like many of you I'd imagine, have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Twitter at the moment. While there are many great aspects of the service, it's become a bit overwhelming to deal with the constant flow of information coming down the pipe. Anyway, a few months ago I wrote a little script to help myself separate the signal from the noise a little. All it does is send you emails from someone you are especially keen on following. I guess I could set up device notifications, but this seemed easier.

Anyhow, I'm calling it Tweemail for now and it's hosted over at Google code.

It's made up of three files:
config.php: This is the config file. It's actually the only thing you need to edit. All you need to do is add the user you want to follow, your email address to send updates to and then their email so that when you hit reply you can reply right back to them.
lastid: This is simply a counter, you don't need to worry about it. It just writes the latest ID of your friend's tweet.
index.php: I should probably rename this, but it's the guts of the operation. Nothing to play with in there.

Anyway, I'm sure the code is pretty gross and could be written much better, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess), you'll need to have your own server to run it and you'll have to be able to set up a cron job, which just runs a script at whatever interval you want (I check once an hour myself).

That's it, hope you enjoy it and it's useful. I know I've found it to be.


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COMMENTS

1Ryan Catbird

I think you should call it "Superfollow."

Actually, I think Twitter should just steal the idea and implement it.

October 29, 2009

2Noah Brier

That would be fine by me (stealing the idea and implementing it).

And superfollow isn't bad at all.

October 29, 2009

3eskimon

Nice work Noah! I know just how you feel.

Twitter lists will hopefully make this 'focusing' thing a bit easier, but there's something a bit odd about it too; if we don't want to see updates from everyone we follow, should we really be following all those people in the first place?

I actually want to keep track of what everyone I follow says; the main challenge is doing that while I'm asleep. Living in Asia makes that quite tricky, because US twitterers are most active during that time.

I've found the easiest solution is to add the RSS feeds from the twitter accounts of the people I follow to Google Reader. This feeds the tweets right in there with all the other web content I follow (blogs, etc.), which has the added advantage of putting tweets into a time-sequential context.

Even better, it allows me to go back and read people's tweets even after twitter stops showing them, as well as search all the tweets I've read (great for the "who said that again?" moments).

I doubt this will be the ideal solution for everyone, but it's another useful way to track the conversations that matter. Hope it helps!

October 30, 2009

4Abe

I think the new twitter lists feature sort of addresses some of these issues. Definitely does what I want, let me sort out a "primo" list of people I really want to follow versus the rest who I'm interested in but could care less if I miss a handful of tweets. Needs some real app support before it really functions though...

On the flip side, a lot of the beauty of twitter is that it creates an environment where you really shouldn't/can't expect to catch everything. No one can ever be like "what how could you not know, didn't you see my tweet!" cause there is no reasonable way to expect someone to see your tweet, unlike your email, vm or maybe even blog post. The result is a much more relaxed form of info. Less stress and pressure associated with it, which makes it way more conversational...

But yeah there are still people whose tweets I don't want to miss...

October 30, 2009

5Sriram Venkitachalam

That is awesome. I've been looking for a tool like this that emails tweets for a while now—for my parents.

November 6, 2009

6Justin Plumber

Nice script you made there. Will have to test it out sometime....

November 8, 2009

7Matt Daniels

Nice stuff--finally get to see curl in action.

November 9, 2009

8Florian Fangohr

Interesting, I had this idea of building a service to email from twitter. You could use this to send yourself a copy of a tweet or reach somebody who isn't on the network but has an email account. You'd sign up, and your twitter account would be monitored by the services server side daemon, similar to what you are doing here. Whenever you tweet an email address, it sends an email through its smtp. A proxy forward to your email address could be stored for the person to reply to.

This could look something like this:
"here goes the public tweet @person@emailhost.com"

You could take this further and make nicknames for your friends who refuse to join. Nothing earth shattering, just a niche web service.

December 4, 2009

9Andy Michaels

Yeah, I guess this is what the Twitter list is for. So we could screen those that we are seriously following and segregate their streams apart from the others. It also shows us how many or who are intently following on our updates.

December 16, 2009

10Will Oliver

So basically we can use this instead of twitter lists? Like sending specific updates to different email addresses?

January 24, 2010

11Xavier

I've created a kind of similar service on http://listimonkey.com
You can subscribe by email to the tweets of a single Twitter user or to a Twitter List.
Tweets are sent hourly or daily to your inbox.
You can even filter tweets by keywords (to only get tweets about the topic you want to follow).

February 5, 2010