When I started using Twitter (December, 2006), there was a feature added shortly after I started called “Track”. When it was released, I immediately added unlimited SMS to my mobile phone. Twitter explains it in this blog post from September, 2007 but Justine Ezarik really explains it the best in this blog post (copied below).
I’ve avidly been using this new feature on twitter called ‘twitter tracking’. Basically, you can choose any word or phrase to atomically search the public timeline and then have it filtered directly to your phone.
I’ve found it most useful tracking @ijustine and ijustine (or for you, track yourself). Anytime anyone twitters my screen name, it’s sent directly to my phone via SMS. Beautiful! It’ll constantly keep you in the loop even while away from your computer — which is ultimately the main goal of twitter.
A few of my other favorites to track is “Steve Jobs”, “overheard” and “Pittsburgh”. While in Dallas last week, I added “Dallas” to my list of words to track. I was quite surprised find a lot of fellow twitters stuck in Dallas traffic. You’d be amazed at what you might find.
How do you set it up? It’s quite simple! You’ll just need to set up twitter on your mobile device and then send track whatever you want to track here to twitter’s short code 40404. That’s it! Happy tracking.
Track was a very cool feature. Long before there were iPhone or Blackberry apps and long before tracking replies was easy, we had Track and it was my favorite feature. Well, when Twitter was having a ton of downtime issues in 2008, they removed Track with a blog post that sounded like it was coming back soon. Of course, it’s August of 2009 (1.5 years after removing the feature) and Track has yet to re-appear.
When Apple announced Push Notifications for the iPhone in June 2008 (finally releasing them in June 2009) I was stoked because it wouldn’t take very long before an app developer used this to notify me of Replies. Boxcar was the first app that did this right and I’m stoked but have some concerns.
Boxcar will notify you with an SMS style notification when someone replies or DMs you. You can disable the DM notifications if you would rather get actual text messages. I prefer this method because AT&T service is crap and I get SMS no matter what but a push notification requires an Internet connection which wouldn’t work if in an elevator or basically anywhere in San Francisco. Additionally, I usually DM people using SMS anyway by sending, “D USERNAME MESSAGE” and it goes through even with very limited cell signal.
Boxcar is $2.99 which is steep for a single purpose application. My justification is that push notifications require the app developer run a server that negotiates with Apple and that server costs money. My $2.99 pays for the app and server to push the notifications so that’s valuable to me. What does bother me though is when I buy an application, the developer isn’t required to keep that server up forever. If he decides to take the serve down and pull the app in 60 days, my $2.99 is useless since this app’s only purpose is for push notifications.
Another shortfall of Boxcar is that it only sends replies and DMs. The beauty of Twitter Track is that I could track ANYTHING! I could send an SMS to 40404 (Twitter) that says, “Track iPhone” and soon I’d get an SMS update for every mention of iPhone. or I could stalk people replying to my girlfriend (which I’m guilty of doing) but Boxcar doesn’t allow me to do that. It would be great to also enter keywords and have Boxcar notify me of those as well.
Boxcar works great though. I have it set to notify me of replies, when I unlock the iPhone, Tweetie opens automatically ( you can choose a few different apps depending on what you have installed) but when Tweetie opens it doesn’t open a reply automatically. Once Tweetie opens, I have to click, “Replies” and then reply to that person.
Boxcar doesn’t work when EDGE or 3G is Unavailable so it’s very dependent on your Internet connection unless you have Wi-Fi. The app is easy to configure and easy to use for a single purpose app. Of course, I don’t think the dominance of this app will last for long once the more popular apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed and Twittelator add the feature themselves as a value add but for now I’m happy with Boxcar and would recommend it for power Twitter users that want a little bit more power, notifications and those that loved Twitter Track back in 2007 and want a bit of that feature back (even if it’s limited and relies on an Internet connection).
Search The app store for Boxcar to download this app and check out more details. This review also covers the app and its features in picture form. I’m lazy so won’t be taking photos for this blog post.