Image by Matthew Maber

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? If you use Twitter SMS to receive text messages on your phone, then you’re going to want to be able to see when people directly reply to you. (Aside: If you’re not a Twitter user and I’ve lost you at this point, I’ll see you at the next post. I promise it won’t be about Twitter. Okay, half-promise.)

If you’re following 150 people, you probably don’t want a text message every time one of them updates. Unless you’re committed to nothing else in your life. But you DO want to know when they send you an @reply. Am I right? I thought so. Like I said, it’s obvious.

Currently, you’d have to turn on SMS notification for all 150 people in order receive all of their @replies. With this setup, you still wouldn’t be able to see the @replies of people who you are not following. And you’d be getting a new tweeted text message every 5 seconds. (This could work well if you’re trying to convince a client that you’re in extremely high demand, but for all other purposes, it’s probably not good.)

Twitter used to have a tracking feature that allowed you to send something like “track @sarahjbray” to Twitter, and then they would send you every post that had @sarahjbray in it. But that feature is currently disabled. Bummer for us.

There is a solution, but it’s not perfect. Its one (pretty major) flaw is that you’ll see the tweet, but you will not be able to see who sent it to you. But still, it’s nice to get the messages. And sometimes you’ll just know who sent it. Or possibly you are clairvoyant, in which case this would be a perfect solution.

So with that caveat, let’s move forward.

1. Go to http://search.twitter.com and submit a search for your twitter username (i.e. @sarahjbray)
2. Below the search bar, there is a column on the right-hand side. The first link listed is called “Feed for this Query.” Right-click on it, and copy and paste it somewhere for later retrieval.
3. Go to notify.me and sign up for an account.
4. You’ll get a verification email in your inbox, which you’ll need to process. It’s not necessary to do this before moving on to the next step.
5. Click “Start account setup” on the lower right of your screen.
6. Fill in the fields under “Add a text message (SMS) destination” with your mobile phone info and click “Add SMS destination”.
7. Wait for the text message that will have your validation code in it. Enter the validation code in the box and submit it.
8. Click “Jump to next step”.
9. Unless you want to receive your tweets via IM as well, click “Jump to next step” again.
10. Under “Add a feed manually,” paste the feed that you copied in step 2. Then click “Add feed”.
11. Click “Jump to next step”.
12. Unless you want to add a bookmarklet to your browser to add more feeds later, click “Jump to next step” again. You should see a page that says that you’re all done. But you’re not.
13. Click the “Account” tab at the top of the page.
14. Click the “Sources” button.
15. Delete the notify.me news feed (so that you won’t receive their updates by text) by clicking “Delete” underneath “notify.me news”.
16. Next to your Twitter search item, there should be several yellow icons indicating IM, SMS, email, etc. Click on the IM icon to de-activate it. It should look greyed out.
17. Click on the SMS icon to activate it. It should now be the only icon that is activated.

That’s it. Now you can receive cryptic @replies on your cell phone without activating SMS for all of your tweeps. The fun part will be guessing who they’re from.

Note: For this use, rssfwd.com does not work reliably. You will receive updates hours later or never. Feed My Inbox and Twilert might possibly work, but it will only send you updates once a day. xFruits.com is a possibility, but I haven’t tried it yet.

By the way, you can use this method to track anything that you can search for using Twitter search.