the iphone guru

Oliver Nelson

So I heard that Twitter has an SMS gateway to allow you to twat/tweet from a mobile phone.  Since I use Tweetie, I’d never really looked into it much though.  I finally took the time yesterday to get everything setup and now I’m smitten.  For me the best part is being able to send pictures to my Twitter account without even opening an app.  Here’s how you can waste time setting up alternative methods by which you can waste time…

1. Login to your Twitter account from a web browser and go to settings and then click on the Mobile tab.

2. Text the word “START” to 40404 (for the U.S., or whatever number it tells you to use based on your country).

3. After you receive a reply, you will text back your username.  After another reply, you will text back your Twitter password (noting of course that the iPhone will try and capitalize the first letter you enter).

4. After you receive ANOTHER reply, text back “OK”:

5. If all of the above was done correctly, you should now be all setup for sending and receiving tweets from your iPhone.  Just add a Twitter contact on your phone and put in the mobile as 40404 (or 21212, 86444, or whatever matches up with your country).

Give a mouse a cookie…

Now you can tweet any short message you like.  Of course, as soon as I had this setup, I knew that the only way I’d be happy was if I could use this for all my twatting, including all those twatted pics (have I made you feel awkward yet with THAT word? There’s a doozy coming up).

My first inclination was to turn to twitpic.com for a solution.  The site is always fast in comparison to img.ly or yfrog.  But alas, I could only send a pic without any comment using twitpic.  So yfrog to the rescue.  yFrog is a bit slower, but its got what it takes to make my dream a reality:

1. Open up yfrog in a browser and in the upper right corner, click the big sign in with Twitter button.  This should take you to an allow or deny message from Twitter.  Click Allow so that yfrog can access your Twitter account to post picture links.

2. It should redirect you back to the yfrog home page, and have a welcome message for your Twitter username in the upper right corner again.  Also, you should notice an email address up there with it.  This is your private email address to twat pics too.  Take note of this email address.

3. Now lets go back to our iPhone and edit that Twitter contact we made.  Add this yfrog email address to the Twitter contact.

4. Here’s the part I straight up didn’t know.  Open up the Messaging app on your phone and start a new message.  As you start typing in Twitter as the recipient, you’ll notice that email address is also listed:

5. Just pick the email address and then type a message (WARNING: You have to type some message BEFORE including the image.  If you don’t type some message, this won’t work)  Now just hit the camera button and either pick or take a picture.  Hit send and revel in the fact that you just MMS’d a picture into your Twitter feed!  My friend, that was a first class twat! (told you it was coming)

Notes: The message DOESN”T go out of your email account, it is truly an MMS that results in an email to yfrog, but the email is from your mobile carrier not you.  You need a 3G, 3GS, or a Jailbroken 2G with MMS activated to pull off the picture part.  Twitpic works great if you don’t want to include a message with the image (it throws away any message you do include in fact).   Also remember that standard text/MMS messaging rates apply (hopefully you have an unlimited plan).  Lastly, you are now going to be getting all of your tweets on your phone.  You can easily customize what you get and when you get it though.