blackberry on S Anand

Google search via e-mail

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:07:52 +0000

I’ve updated Mixamail to access Google search results via e-mail.

For those new here, Mixamail is an e-mail client for Twitter. It lets you read and update Twitter just using your e-mail (you’ll have to register once via Twitter, though).

Now, you can send an e-mail to twitter@mixamail.com with a subject of “Google” and a body containing your query. You’ll get a reply within a few seconds (~20 seconds on my BlackBerry) with the top 8 search results along with the snippets.

It’s the snippets that contain the useful information, as far as I’m concerned. Just yesterday, I managed to find the show timings for Manmadan Ambu at the Ilford Cine World via a search on Mixamail. (Mixamail win, but the movie was a let down, given expectations.)

You don’t need to be registered to use this. So if you’re ever stuck with just e-mail access, just mail twitter@mixamail.com with a subject “Google”.

PS: The code is on Github.

Comments

S Anand 29 Dec 2010 3:48 pm: Sorry about that, Shankar. I’ve fixed that. (Simple bug: was looking for registration even though it wasn’t required)
Shankar V 29 Dec 2010 5:36 am:AnandI tried to send an email to this id with subject Google and emial body text “Retail industry IT trends”. I got the following response. Anything I missed?

Hi Shankar Viswanathan,You just mailed us. But we’re not sure we’ve been introduced, so here goes:We’re Mixamail.Mixamail lets you access Twitter via e-mail. This is useful if you have e-mail but not Internet access (e.g. on your BlackBerry).You haven’t yet logged in, but you can still search for public tweets. Mail twitter@mixamail.com with a subject “Search whatever-you-want”. We’ll reply with tweets mentioning whatever-you-want.But if you log in at http://www.mixamail.com and give Shankar_V05@infosys.com access to your Twitter account, you can read and update tweets too.Enjoy!Mixamailhttp://www.mixamail.com/
Aditya Deo 3 Jan 2011 12:22 pm: Ohh! So it’s developed by you? This service is terrific! :) Thanks!
Yasuro 3 May 2011 11:00 am: Is your service working? It worked beautifully with the sample query in your article, but when I tried “who is Obama,” I got “No search results.”
Yasuro 3 May 2011 9:52 am: Great service, Shankar. I have unlimited email on my Android cell phone, but not Internet in general. So this is precisely the kind of service I was looking for. I am wondering if you could create a separate email address for this, e.g., google@mixamail.com, so we can skip the step of inputting “Google” in the subject field. The email app my cell phone carrier supplies is flawed, so you cannot automatically fill the subject field. Because of the non-standard-conforming behavior of the email server of the carrier, that is the only app that you can use to send and/or receive emails; I cannot use any other email client. :( I’d appreciate it if you could consider it. Thank you. Yasuro

Twitter via e-mail

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:24:45 +0000

Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do.

So, obviously, I wrote one this weekend: Mixamail.com.

I’ve kept it as simple as I could. If I send an email to twitter@mixamail.com, it replies with the latest tweets on my Twitter home page. If I mail it again, it replies with new tweets since the last email.

I can update my status by sending a mail with “Update” as the subject. The first line of the body is the status.

I can reply to tweets. The tweets contain a “reply” link that opens a new mail and replies to it.

I can subscribe to tweets. Sending an email with “subscribe” as the subject sends the day’s tweets back to me every day at the same hour that I subscribed. (I’m keeping it down to daily for the moment, but if I use it enough, may expand it to a higher frequency.)

Soon enough, I’ll add re-tweeting and (update: added retweets on 27 Oct) a few other things. I intend keeping this free. Will release the source as well once I document it. The source code is at Github.

Give it a spin: Mixamail.com. Let me know how it goes!

For the technically minded, here are a few more details. I spent last night scouting for a small, nice, domain name using nxdom. I bought it using Google Apps for $10. The application itself is written in Python and hosted on AppEngine. I use the Twitter API via OAuth and store the user state via Lilcookies. The HTML is based on html5boilerplate, and has no images.

Comments

Jayson 26 Oct 2010 6:41 pm: Pretty neat work! What was the time taken for this to be done?
S Anand 26 Oct 2010 6:46 pm: Let’s see… 5 hours on Sunday to get the Twitter API working… 4 hours yesterday to get the user management sorted… about 5 hours today to get the UI done. About 14 hours so far.
Aravinda 26 Oct 2010 6:52 pm: Very nice app :)
Praveen 26 Oct 2010 8:03 pm: Awesome app.
pgt 27 Oct 2010 11:25 pm: have you checked out posterous.com , they do twitter among other things
Rockey 27 Oct 2010 11:31 pm: Tussi Great ho !
Amitesh 2 Nov 2010 7:23 am: Hey, I am not a techie but this application looks sure value to me. Great work!

The hunt for a Twitter client

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I hadn’t jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon for a while. I’m not much of a conversationalist, nor am I a very sociable. I also tend to stay away from social networks. But I figured I would try Twitter out for a while, mostly because it’s an outlet for short comments. For long articles, I have my blog. For sharing links, I have Google Reader and del.icio.us. I don’t quite have anything for that occasional moment when I want to say, “Hey! A great way to shred mint leaves is to freeze them!”

The question is what client to use. I wanted something free, portable and featherweight (as in lighter than lightweight: no additional memory usage.)

SMS is the classic Twitter channel. But I don’t like being bothered by SMS messages often. Besides, it’s not free. So that’s out.

The next best would be e-mail via my BlackBerry. The problem is, Twitter doesn’t accept tweets via e-mail. So when looking for alternatives, I found Identi.ca, which is even better than Twitter except for the fact that it doesn’t have Twitter’s user base. Anyway, it accepted e-mail, so that was fine.

On the desktop, the browser is the obvious choice. But somehow, going to the Twitter home page and typing out a tweet felt so… Web 1.0. I didn’t fashion installing a client just for tweeting, like Twhirl. The closest was instant messenger software. Since Identi.ca accepts messages via XMPP, I could install Google Talk and send messages via instant messenger.

That worked for a couple of weeks. Then I pulled out. Instant messenger has the disadvantage of making you accessible, and I honestly don’t have the time. Plus, I don’t fancy running apps persistently, not even something as light as Google Talk. So back to square one.

In the meantime, I was having another problem with sending updates via BlackBerry. My corporate mails have a HUGE disclaimer attached to them. Doesn’t make sense to have 140 character message followed by a 940 character disclaimer. I’d have to get rid of those anyway.

After a bit of digging around, I came across mail handlers. I can write a program on my server to handle mails. So I wrote one that strips out the disclaimer and forwards it to my identi.ca e-mail ID. (Now I’ve modified it to use the API.) So that solves my mobile twittering problem.

It also solves my cross-posting problem. I maintain a twitter.com/sanand0 and an identi.ca/sanand0 account and keep them updated in parallel. My mail handler updates the post on both services.

As for the desktop, I have the best solution of all. I use the browser address bar to twitter. I’ve created a keyword search with the keyword “twitter” with is keyed to a URL like http://www.s-anand.net/twitter/%s. So if I say “twitter Some message” on the address bar and press enter, it contacts the server, which updates Identi.ca and Twitter using the API.

Of course, you don’t really need to do that to update Twitter. Just create a keyword search with a keyword “twitter” and a URL http://twitter.com/home?status=%s, and you’re done. Remember: you can create keyword searches in Internet Explorer as well (read how). With this, you can update twitter from the address bar by just typing “twitter your message goes here”.

Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying just two things.

Mail handlers are cool.
Keyword searches let you update Twitter from the address bar using the URL http://twitter.com/home?status=%s

Comments

Ashish 21 Nov 2008 11:32 am: Did you try Twitterbar extension in Firefox?
Kiran 22 Nov 2008 1:32 pm: Twitterfox - nice, and unobtrusive enough browser extension. Twitterbar - does the stuff you mentioned as part of the keyword-searches experiment
S Anand 23 Nov 2008 2:10 am: Thanks Ashish, Kiran – didn’t know about those. Except, I’ve moved to Google Chrome
these days (mostly for its memory management). But will get back to trying
these once Firefox 3.10 is out of Beta,
somnath 1 Dec 2008 2:40 am: As usual you have come up with something cool and original :) I am still using web for Tweeting … TweetDeck did not work for me checking Twhirl now
Vivek Sonny Abraham 6 Dec 2008 9:20 am: Or you could use TwitterBerry (http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/)
Sai 8 Dec 2008 9:50 pm: :) good post! I finally got on to the social network bandwagon myself last year and found the experience quite enjoyable. Biggest benefit was obviously the ability to connect with old friends. Use twitter as well, but not as much. Hope all’s well.

blackberry on S Anand

Google search via e-mail

Comments

Shankar V 29 Dec 2010 5:36 am:AnandI tried to send an email to this id with subject Google and emial body text “Retail industry IT trends”. I got the following response. Anything I missed?

Twitter via e-mail

Comments

The hunt for a Twitter client

Comments