SMStweet lets you Tweet via local SMS

I had been to Nokia developer conference few weeks back. Met lot of interesting people there, shared ideas, it was fun. I also met Mayank there & got to know about SMStweet which he built. SMStweet enables user to post Tweets via SMS. To use this service just go to SMStweet.in & sign in using Twitter. This service uses Twitter oAuth & hence doesn’t store your twitter login information. After authenticating with twitter, give your mobile number to SMStweet & start using the service right away.

Send TWT YourTweet to 09220092200 or 09243000111 to post a tweet. If your tweet gets posted successfully, you will receive a response message containing latest @reply made to you.

Tweeting is fun when you share your experiences right away. Once I tweeted from middle of a river! SMSTweet just enables you to do it! No need of a GPRS connection, no need of a fancy device, all you need is a mobile phone & every mobile phone supports SMS (Do I have to say that?). I also find SMStweet useful to post interesting forwarded SMSs to Twitter!

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We Meet is a pilot project developed by Nokia Research Centers in Bangalore & Palo Alto collaboratively. We Meet has been developed mainly keeping India in mind. We Meet is a group messaging system in which user can create groups & send messages to group. Well, we know there are many group SMS systems already available like SMSGupShup. But these SMS groups are one way, only administrator of the group can send messages to the group. But in We Meet all the members can post messages & hence it is more interactive. So, at the cost of one SMS you can reach out to an entire group of people. We Meet is purely SMS based & doesn’t require GPRS active. We Meet is location aware, location of the user will be attached to his message. We Meet compares tower information with it’s database to get the location of a user.

We Meet is available in three forms, java based client, text only client & web client. Java client is very nicely designed as you can see in the screenshots. Using java client allows you to perform all the operations including creating groups, add members to group, chat with a group..etc. Java client also has privacy settings to enable/disable location sharing and also options to turn off the service for a while. SMS counter in java client gives you a glance of how many SMSs you have sent & received. For those who can’t install java application, can still use We Meet with text only mode. In text only mode, everything happens over SMS, user has to prefix his mesaages with keyword commands (ex: ACCEPT BLOGGERS will accept the invitation to join group Bloggers). Web client is still under development & might probably go live very soon.

We Meet java client makes sure that messages sent & received using it won’t appear in your phone’s SMS inbox. That actually helps in keeping your phone’s inbox clean & organized. Messages which are sent & received using We Meet gets stored in the server & hence doesn’t eat up phone’s memory. We Meet is a free service, but you have to pay your operator for SMSs as per the plan you are on. We Meet is currently using a Karnataka based mobile phone number, so if you have got plenty of free local SMSs, you don’t have to worry about charges!! Even if you are in any place outside karnataka, it still can workout cheaper since one SMS goes to entire group of people.

Know more about We Meet & get your hands on the application at wemeet.nokiapaloalto.com

When I switched my email ID, I switched my Gtalk ID also. I don’t wanted to use the old ID just for IM. But how to tell everyone about it? My friends list on Gtalk is very huge! I Googled for available options to set auto responder for my old ID. I come across answer.im which just does the job but went down after just few hours. Then I found another desktop application to set auto responder, but this works only when your computer is on. So, I wasn’t satisfied with both of them.

Imified is a free service which provides you hosted IM bots. User can write it’s behavior  in his favorite server side language like PHP. So, following are few things you must know/have to complete this Auto Responder Bot:

• Imified account, off course you can get one at imified.com if you don’t have.
• Web Space to put your IM end point script (Ex: PHP File). There are few free hosting providers which you can make use of.
• Knowledge of a server side scripting language, not must, but if you know, you can add more functionality. I will give the basic PHP code in this tutorial.

Now that you have an Imified account, create a new bot clicking on “Create New Bot”. Give your bot a name & select a bot.im ID, both of these are not important since you are going to use this for personal use on your existing Gtalk/MSN/Yahoo/AIM ID. But “Bot URL” is important here, you need to specify end point script file path which will be accessed whenever somebody pings your ID. In my case, I placed this file at http://prashanth.net/bot.php.

Once your Bot is created, you can see options to add other networks at the bottom. Select the network which you want to set the auto responder, here I am opting for Gtalk. Just enter username, password, nickname and click activate.

Now your bot is active, but we haven’t created our end point script yet, so bot still don’t know what to respond if somebody pings it! So the basic PHP script for auto responder is as follows (which is placed at http://prashanth.net/bot.php) :

<?php

echo “Hey, I am no longer available on this ID. Please add me as prashanth@prashanth.net on your Gtalk to chat with me. Thanks, Prashanth”;

?>

Just open a text editor, like notepad, copy/paste the above code & save it as bot.php, upload it to your server. Make sure you upload it to the same path you gave to Imified in Bot URL field. This is very basic script to enable auto responder, I guess which is just enough. Imified passes various variables to this page through GET which you can make use of to write more interactive auto responder. Go through Imified API documentation for more on it.

So our always ON (24X7!!!) auto responder is up!

Update: As Adam said in comment section, user need not to use any scripting language until unless he wants to make use of variables passed by the Bot. So, for this purpose, we can simply use a text (.txt) file instead of PHP.

More & more people are switching to Firefox & enjoying tabbed browsing with favorite keyboard shortcut CNTRL + T. I am the one who opens too many tabs on Firefox & get’s confused. Firefox Showcase is a plugin for firefox which eases browsing on multiple tabs. Firefox Showcase showcases all the opened tabs in thumbnail form which helps you to switch to any tab you want quickly.

Firefox Showcase has different keyboard shortcuts to present the showcase as follows:

F12: Showcases all tabs in a new pop up window, window automatically disappears after selecting a tab.

CNTRL+ALT+T: Showcases all tabs in a new tab, tab closes automatically after selecting a tab.

CNTRL+ALT+S: Showcases all tabs in sidebar & remains even after selecting a tab.

I find showing tabs in sidebar as I have a wide screen monitor, might not be good if you have a normal monitor. See following screen shots with all modes:

Showcase in a window

Showcase in Sidebar

GoAnimate.com

Creating animation was always a professional job, you should be master in many tools to create one. But Go Animate, an online tool which makes easy to create animation without any expert/professional knowledge. At Go Animate you can create, share animations & watch animations created by others.

Go Animate provides you with simple interface using which you can drag & drop characters, give transition effects, background music, talk bubbles…etc. To start with, you can use available templates & modify it according to your taste. For ex: I used a template & changed the characters faces with my friends faces! Check out that animation below:

Visit Syntha Site

Want to build your own website? Don’t know what are all required for it? Don’t know anything technical about it? Syntha Site is just for you!

Syntha Site is a free service which provides you tools to design your website without any coding knowledge. It has lot of ready templates which you can select & modify for your purpose. It has very easy to use web builder with drag & drop feature which doesn’t require any coding knowledge. After you are done with building your site, Syntha Site also offers you a free subdomain & space to host it. Means that you will get yoursite.synthasite.com for free! If you want unique identity & ready to spend a bit money, you can have your own domain. You can register domain at any domain registrar like www.godaddy.com by paying around Rs.400 for a domain like yourname.com, yourcompany.com…etc. later you can easily configure it to work with Syntha Site as you web site files will be at Syntha Site. If you have your own web space, you can download your website & host it on your own hosting.

Visit www.synthasite.com to creat your own website.

Google has stopped working on Browser Sync for Firefox. That means you can’t have Google Sync to work on the latest version of Firfox, i.e, Firefox 3. For those who don’t know about Google Sync, it syncs your browsing history, bookmarks…on different installations of Firefox! If you have Firefox on two or more computers, you can sync all your browsing data by installing Google Browser Sync addon for Firefox. But, now Google has discontinued development on Browser Sync for Firefox. I think this is one of the feature which browser should have inbuilt like in opera 9.5 (latest version) has it!

Foxmarks is a Firefox plugin, a good alternative for Google Browser Sync. Similar to Google Browser Sync, Foxmarks also saves all your browser changes in it’s server. You will have to install Foxmarks plugin for Firefox, which is also available for Firefox 3! If you are using this first time, you will be guided through a wizard to create a new account. Once done, it starts syncing bookmarks in the back end. Now install this addon in all other computers which you are running Firfox & want to sync bookmarks, give your login & password which was created first time. Now changes in bookmarks you make on any computer gets reflected everywhere! Install Foxmarks from www.foxmarks.com

Usually I download lot of stuff from internet, sometimes when I want to go to bed, it says 1hour remaining. I would be in a confusion state whether to sleep & run my PC all night or wait till it completes or pause downloading & shutdown the PC. I wished if a sleep timer functionality like in TV implemented for PCs.

Though this functionality doen’t comes with Windows XP, I found a freeware which simply does that. Auto Shutdown is a freeware with which you can set sleep time & it automatically shuts down the PC at that time! This really filled my requirement, depending on download I can set a time to shutdown. When I start my PC again, I can see completed download. The sleep timer was useful for me because of downloads, you might have different requirements to set sleep timer. If you can estimate completeion time for any process running on your PC, instead of sitting in front of it until it ends, just set sleep timer.

In case downloading, several download managers like Free Download Manager comes with an option to shutdown computer after completion of downloads. For all other cases you can get Auto Shutdown at Rabid Software.

Yeah! it’s the easiest way to set a Guinness World Record! As we all love worlds’s most advanced, most customizable browser, we can help it to set a world record. It’s new version Firefox 3 is to be released soon. Official date for it’s release is not yet announced. So, Firefox 3 is all set to make a guinness world record as most downloaded software in 24 hours. The date to download will be announced on Spreadfirefox.com. You can also pledge & give your email ID, and a reminder will be sent to your email ID too.

Let’s join hands & set this world record