Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do.
So, obviously, I wrote one this weekend: Mixamail.com.
I’ve kept it as simple as I could. If I send an email to twitter@mixamail.com, it replies with the latest tweets on my Twitter home page. If I mail it again, it replies with new tweets since the last email.
I can update my status by sending a mail with “Update” as the subject. The first line of the body is the status.
I can reply to tweets. The tweets contain a “reply” link that opens a new mail and replies to it.
I can subscribe to tweets. Sending an email with “subscribe” as the subject sends the day’s tweets back to me every day at the same hour that I subscribed. (I’m keeping it down to daily for the moment, but if I use it enough, may expand it to a higher frequency.)
Soon enough, I’ll add re-tweeting and (update: added retweets on 27 Oct) a few other things. I intend keeping this free. Will release the source as well once I document it. The source code is at Github.
Give it a spin: Mixamail.com. Let me know how it goes!
For the technically minded, here are a few more details. I spent last night scouting for a small, nice, domain name using nxdom. I bought it using Google Apps for $10. The application itself is written in Python and hosted on AppEngine. I use the Twitter API via OAuth and store the user state via Lilcookies. The HTML is based on html5boilerplate, and has no images.
Pretty neat work! What was the time taken for this to be done?
Let’s see… 5 hours on Sunday to get the Twitter API working… 4 hours yesterday to get the user management sorted… about 5 hours today to get the UI done. About 14 hours so far.
Very nice app 🙂
Awesome app.
have you checked out posterous.com , they do twitter among other things
Tussi Great ho !
Hey,
I am not a techie but this application looks sure value to me.
Great work!