A Quick Way To Get Free SMS & Email Alerts Of Your Twitter Mentions

Perhaps you have taken the plunge and established your Twitter persona after hearing so much about the incredible growth of this social networking application. Now it’s time for you to track how much of your own voice has grown on the Web through Twitter.
Maybe you wish to know how many others are retweeting what you said. You could certainly perform a search over at search.twitter.com or monitor your mentions through a Twitter client, but since you want to be productive on Twitter, why not get these searches delivered to your inbox or via free SMS alerts to your phone?
Here’s an easy way to do it if you already have a Yahoo! ID and an AOL account.

Using Yahoo! Pipes

The Digital Inspiration blog posted a nice how-to article on subscribing to password-protected feeds. To summarize it, you can subscribe to your favorite password-protected feed if you type your username and password right in the RSS feed URL, which is why it is a good idea to use Yahoo! Pipes to mask the feed URL.
Not everyone will be comfortable putting their password in plain text, but as long as you don’t publish your feed URL in Yahoo! Pipes, you shouldn’t have to worry too much, since the Pipes aren’t searchable (they’re not indexed in search engines).

1. First, go to the Yahoo! Pipes site and login with your Yahoo! ID in the top right corner of the page.
2. Select Create a pipe.
3. Drag the Fetch Feed module to the larger space at the right of the module and in the text box, type “http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss” without the quotes.

4. What you just entered is actually the RSS feed of your mentions from the regular Twitter website (without the “USERNAME:PASSWORD@” part, as you see below) so now just replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Twitter username and password, respectively.

5. Now click and drag the circle from the Fetch Feed module and connect to the circle at the top of the Pipe Output module.

6. Now hit Save at the top right, name this pipe (something like twitter replies could suffice), and click onRun Pipe…
7. Make sure not to click on Publish once you’re on the freshly-made pipe. Right-click on the orange RSS button (Get as RSS) and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut.

Getting SMS & Email Alerts

Now that you have the RSS feed of your Twitter mentions, you can subscribe to it in Google Reader, Netvibes or your favorite RSS reader. Alternatively, if you constantly check your email, try using Blogtrottr (which is great for real-time email alerts) or FeedMyInbox (which lets you subscribe to 5 feeds for free).
I actually prefer AOL Alerts to get feed alerts delivered to my phone in SMS form, although the service also alerts your inbox of new RSS feed items.

1. Head to the AOL Alerts page and click on Sign In at the top right corner.
2. After you have signed in, click on Feeds under Category.
3. Paste the URL you copied from Yahoo! Pipes in the textbox of the grey Add your own Feeds module at the bottom right corner of the page. Click Add.

4. Choose from the Delivery Frequency options. For almost real-time updates, select Live (mentions delivered via SMS are delayed by 10-15 minutes, while mentions delivered via email take 45 minutes to an hour). You can also choose a Scheduled daily delivery at a time you prefer.

5. Now choose whether you want updates sent to your AIM screen name, email (you can add your primary address if you click on Change) and mobile phone. You must register your cell number if you haven’t already. This also enables you to receive IMs even when you’re offline so this is excellent for users with unlimited texting plans.
6. Hit Save.

Since AOL Alerts give you the option of subscribing to keywords in your RSS feed, AOL Alerts could be your own RSS-to-email (with ReadTwit’s incredibly useful service) or RSS-to-IM service (a lot of which are extinct, except for RSS.IM and Inezha) so you won’t have to use Gmail as a middleman forwarder and be forced to use part of your 7+GB storage. You can also try Yahoo! Alerts, but it doesn’t seem to ever update me at my email or mobile.
If you wish for an easier alert system, you could take a peek at other services, such as FeedTwit and TwextMe, which send you direct messages and SMS, respectively when someone mentions you on Twitter. You can also track Twitter keywords from Twitter, from Monitter and by searching Twitter. While you’re monitoring your name, you might as well track what’s being said about you on the web. The method outlined above is just a way to not have to rely on Beta services that may stop working later.
What methods do you use to monitor your Twitter mentions? Also, check out MakeUseOf’s very own Twitter feed for exclusive updates!