Twitter, No Data
April 29, 2012 9:26 AM   Subscribe

Is there a twitter client that will use wifi when its available and sms when its not?

I don;t want a data plan but I still want to use twitter and get the full effect. If you aren't reading all the time its hard to keep up. Is there a client that will work over sms when nessecary and over data otherwise?
posted by Rubbstone to Technology (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I don;t want a data plan

If I understand correctly, providers will not (and somehow cannot) let you activate and use a smartphone without a data plan. Or that's what Verizon told me several years ago (before I made the smartphone leap and wanted to use a hand me down blackberry as a dumb phone). If the ESN is recognized as a smart phone, activating the phone will automatically trigger a data plan. Have you called and checked with your provider?

If you use a non-smartphone touch screen device (like an ipod touch) there is no sms and you can just use any twitter client when you have access to wifi.
posted by special-k at 10:43 AM on April 29, 2012


This kind of swapping doesn't make sense, to me at least. SMS twitter is a service from twitter. An app that shows you your timeline is showing you your timeline. There's no interaction between the two, as twitter doesn't sync your timeline in anyway. Tweetmarkwr is a service that syncs your timeline, but it only runs on a few apps, none of which do this

But anyway, maybe say what kind of phone your using?
posted by Patbon at 11:41 AM on April 29, 2012


Theoretically this is possible. If I ran Twitter Relay Inc that captures your timeline for you, then I could write my app to send tweets based on WiFi ability or not (have the client ping Twitter Relay Inc on a specific interval; if it hasn't checked-in in X minutes then send an SMS). But as far as I know, no one is doing this and the functionality isn't available from Twitter Inc. Plus, this scheme wouldn't work on certain smartphone platforms (iOS).

tl;dr: no, Twitter doesn't work that way.
posted by sbutler at 12:12 PM on April 29, 2012


Response by poster: I have a Huawei Ideos that I bought from Newegg off contract. Its not one of At&t's phones so its unlikely they know its a smartphone otherwise the person paying the bill would have told me. That tweetmarker service though might be right up my alley.
posted by Rubbstone at 5:02 PM on April 29, 2012


You can push tweets to your phone as SMSes.

For any person/account you follow, you can manually turn on SMS notifications. Whenever they tweet, you'll get it as an SMS. However, it is simply broadcasting ALL of their tweets as SMSes without knowing if you have wifi or not.

Using SMS as a substitute for your timeline would be annoying to set up and maintain, and after a while you'll probably spend way too much on paying for text messages. SMS notifications for any ONE account you follow on Twitter are either on or off. You would need to manually turn them on whenever you follow someone new. If someone goes on a tweeting spree, I imagine you will get annoyed pretty quickly.

I don't think Tweetmarker does what you want either, it syncs your "last read" tweet between multiple devices. It's like a bookmark for your reading position, if you, say, have an iPhone and an iPad and Twitteriffic on your laptop. It just marks where you left off. There is no SMS component, it can't deliver your timeline to you. It's more of a extension for an existing Twitter application you already use.
posted by kathryn at 6:11 PM on April 29, 2012


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