Jackson Miller

Twitter has been a little “stressed out” lately. One of the downsides of this is that they have disabled the “replies” tab on twitter.com. Twitter is suggesting that we should use summize.com to check replies.

First off, it must be at least a little embarrassing for Twitter to admit that Summize is better able to query the twitter data set then they are. In Twitter’s defense Summize knew how Twitter was being used when they developed their schema, but still.

Once I started using Summize to check for replies I realized that not only does summize.com work as a backup solution, it actually works better than twitter.com. One problem with Twitter’s replies has always been that it only shows tweets that start with @username instead of all tweets that include @username. The workaround was to “track” @username. That also allowed for all replies to be sent via SMS. Sadly, “track” hasn’t seemed to work with any regularity for weeks now.

So, the question is how can I get replies from Summize to be delivered via SMS. Here is the solution:

1. Create a new account for your replies (i.e. replies2username, so mine is replies2jaxn)
2. Get the RSS feed URL for a summize.com search (i.e. http://summize.com/search.atom?q=%40username)
   update: be sure to filter out your new username or it gets a little redundant. Add “-newusername” to your summize search (i.e. http://summize.com/search?q=+%40jaxn+-replies2jaxn)
3. Go to TwitterFeed.com and set the summize RSS feed to post to the new twitter account. (my settings are: every 30 minutes, up to 5 posts at a time, description only, do not include a link)
4. Log into Twitter with your regular account and follow the new account (be sure to turn on device updates)

An added bonus of this method is that anyone can follow your replies account as well. If for some reason you wanted to see all replies to me on Twitter you could just follow replies2jaxn. The downside of course is that you are limited to receive replies every 30 minutes and will only receive the most recent 5. To make sure I am not missing any I am also subscribing to my summize.com feed (and may also make it an imaginary friend in FriendFeed.