Twitter2GTalk is a great way of showing your latest tweet as your GTalk status. The service takes your last tweet and shows it up as your GTalk status, albeit a few minutes later.

All you need to do is to login to their site with your GTalk login and enter your Twitter username in the settings page. It doesn’t even ask for your password. So feel free to spread the word about @hgeek =P

P.S. – see the email address in the image? Feel free to add me on GTalk anytime if you want to. =)

Wanted to check if a particular Twitter user was following you or any other user? Here’s how. My friend Lakshman Prasad, also known as @scorpion032, has written a small application that checks whether a given user is following another specified user.

The application, hosted over at Appspot, allows you to specify a Twitter username and check if that user is following another user that you specify. Check the following screenshot to understand better.

Twitter-Follow @Appspot.

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.

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! =)