Twitter sends out SMS alerts every time you receive a direct message or a nudge, provided you have chosen to receive such messages. However, Twitter does not send you messages each time you get a reply. When using services such as Vakow! to post messages on Twitter, it would help if you were able to get those replies to you via SMS as well. That’s where we at Harmless Geek come in. =)

If you have activated your mobile number with Twitter, then skip to the next paragraph. Else, head over to your Twitter devices page and activate your mobile number now.

Provided you have five minutes to spare, this tutorial should be pretty easy and straight-forward. Follow the steps:

1. Setup another Twitter account. Try to have a short username for this account, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This account is only for you and for the purpose of receiving @replies. For the purpose of keeping the public timeline clean, make this account “private”.
2. Create an account on Twitterfeed or any similar service.
3. In the following URL, change username to your Twitter username (handle). Also change username2 to the second Twitter account you created at step1.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=username+-username2&show_user=true

4. It should look something like this, where 9_6 is my primary Twitter handle, and santoshgs is the second account I created.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=9_6+-santoshgs&show_user=true

5. Now copy that URL and head over to the Twitterfeed account you created on step 2. Create a new feed with the login details of the second Twitter account, and use the URL we previously created. Include just the title or the description, but not both. Keep the update frequency to a minimum. It should look something similar to the following photo. What we have completed till now is making Twitterfeed post the search feed for your username to your second Twitter account.

   

6. All that remains now is that you follow your second account and activate device updates. (Pardon the username in the following crude image. It should actually be your second account handle.)

   

That’s it. You’re done. Now get @replies SMSed to you wherever you are! Remember, you read this FIRST on Harmless Geek.

You have a picture. It’s not that interesting. Of course, a picture is a lot better than a thousand words of text. But still, the picture isn’t up to the mark. You want to spice up the picture. Add a funny speech baloon or two. That’s fine, but then, it’s rather painful to keep adding a speech baloon every now and then, isn’t it?

Meet SayTweet. SayTweet makes the best use of your photo and your latest tweet.

SayTweet lets you upload a picture (or link to one available online), tag the people with the their twitter user ids, and creates a canvas - your original picture plus the latest twitter update in a speech bubble. Now the awesome part is that this picture is dynamic, and the speech bubble is updated to your latest update from twitter!

So what’re you waiting for? Headover to SayTweet, upload/choose a picture and create a canvas of your own!

Have Fun!

See what we at Harmless Geek have cooked up!

Yesterday we wrote about Copy Paste Character.com, a site that lets you copy special characters to your clipboard with ease.

Today, I came across TwitterKeys, which basically does the same function as Copy Paste Character.com, but provides a lot more special characters. Again, this can be pretty useful on a site such as Twitter. =D

You need to double click the character, and then press Control + C. You can then paste the character on Twitter or any other site that supports UTF8.

Here’s the link.

Copying special characters is pretty easy on Windows. All you need to do is run Character Map from the Start menu. That brings up a window that contains hundreds of special characters, some of which, are pretty useless.

You could instead use Copy Paste Character.com, which is a simple site that does what it says - copies the special character that you select, and you can paste it anywhere, even on Twitter. It’s very easy to use too. Click on the character you want and it is automatically copied to the clipboard.

Day by day, new Twitter tools/mashups are being launched. And here are our picks, as of now, that will enhance your twitter experience.

1. Twits Like Me
Search for Twitter users with similar interests. Takes a while to run, but comes up with interesting results

2. TwitStamp (seriously cool !!)
Easily transform your current Twitter status into an image for use anywhere.

3. LessFriends
Do the people you follow on Twitter, follow you? Less Friends is a service that helps you find out.

4. CrowdStatus
Create a crowd of people and track their current Twitter status. Expanding to Facebook, Jaiku, and Seesmic as well.

5. Favrd
Lists interesting things that show up on Twitter, based on the number of times an item has been declared a ‘favorite’.

6. TweetLists
Lists popular links sent on Twitter by day, week, or in a live stream format. Also has a “twitterati” mode that lists links posted by people with the most followers.

7. Monitter
A trending mashup that lets you monitor the Twitter world for a set of three keywords and watch what people are saying in real-time. One of the besties among our personal favs. We used this one, to keep track of the Google Chrome launch.

8. Twuzzer
A live aggregation of tweets and photos related to large special events. Twuzzer is currently focused on the Beijing Olympics.

9. TweeTake
Already reviewed tool for backing up your Twitter Timeline.

10. TweetRush
A service based on the Rush Hour engine that aims to provide estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time.

11. TwitterRatio
Discover your Twitter ratio and see if you’re more friend or follower.

We are sure to see more and more innovative twitter tools/mashups. Subscribe to HarmLessGeek, so that you don’t miss another helpful tip. You can follow HarmLessGeek and receive updates on Twitter.

We at Harmless Geek feel that this is a tool that every Twitter user should make use of. It’s _the_ Twitter tool, IHGO.

How does backing up the tweets of your followers, your friends, your favorites, your own tweets, or _everything_ sound to you? It sure as hell made us jump up and take notice.

Tweetake lets you take a backup of everything you ever did on Twitter (yes, including that very humiliating tweet you made last summer). It can even backup your private timeline (like mine), unlike many other Tweet Backup tools. It does so by using the Twitter API in conjunction with your username/password, and then provides you with a .CSV format of the backup.

Quite convenient, eh? We think so too! =)