In this post I will show you how to subscribe to twitter to receive free sms alerts on your cell phone. You can receive live soccer goals, weather forecasts, traffic alerts, the IST canteen menu, you name it ...

UPDATE 2008-08-27: DISCLOSURE 1: SMS ALERTS AREN'T FREE IN THE U.S. It depends on your text-messaging plan.
DISCLOSURE 2: Unfortunately Twitter stopped paying the bill for SMS sent from the UK number. So, if you're in Europe, you can still subscribe to the alerts, but you can't receive the SMS updates. Bummer. There are alternatives like Jaiku (google sponsored) that does send SMS updates. But we haven't migrated our alerts there, yet ;)


1 - Feeling lucky on "twitter"


2 - Join the twitter network



3 - Enter your new username password and email. (Make sure the username is available!)



4 - Create your account



5 - Skip the friends contamination



6 - Choose to configure your phone



7 - Provide your cell phone number and international code call. Make sure it's ok for Twitter to txt messages to your phone, and save.



8 - You need to send the code that twitter gives you to their international phone number in the UK. This step is required only once, as a first time, to make sure you really are the owner of the phone.



10 - Now that you've got a twitter account with the phone enabled, let's start following some alert agents on twitter. From the address bar, goto pointpt on twitter.



11 - Follow pointpt, so you can get updates whenever new free alerts are set up!



13 - Then, activate the updates on the mobile device (i.e. the phone)



14 - Yup, you need to click on ON to make sure that you'll receive the alerts on your phone.


15 - Ok, twitter confirms: you will now receive any time a new txt alert on your phone.



16 - But you can follow more interesting followers of PointPt. Follow the SMS alerts that you like. In this walkthrough, we will follow weatherlisbon, the daily weather forecast agent for Lisbon, sent every morning at 8:30, local time. Click on the weather icon of weatherlisbon.



17 - Follow weatherlisbon (make sure that you're happy to receive those kind of messages on your phone every morning).




18 - Activate your mobile devices.


19 - Make sure you click on ON, so you may receive SMS alerts from this alert agent.


20 - Ok, device updates are ON. Tomorrow morning, get ready to receive the weather forecast for Lisbon city, every day of the rest of your life ;)



21 - If you ever stop receiving txt messages on your phone, send a txt message from your phone to the twitter UK number with the message "ON". Twitter will send you a reply, and the alerts will be reactivated for your phone.

Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal. He happens to play ball - real hard - both at the White House AND at Google. He's playing with fire though, and it could easily backfire on his employers.
The new Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the XXIst century, a prototypical example of the lacquay that out-wits the masters of the house he serves. This article, and the Edward Snowden case, are a glympse iMHO to a silent-war going on, mostly between the future world-dominating nations (or corporations???), US, China, ..., but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, etc ...

Scenarios outcomes? I would bet on political borders to become obsolete, and on social-network based new nations (or tribes?). Alexander, Julius, Napoleon, Adolf and Benito, they all had big plans, but they just missed the right technology to make the entire world yield into whole "Gaia Pax". Today, technology is almost ripe, almost, to make it a breeze to administrate over 100 billions of citizens, within the blink of a byte. Not only there CAN be only one, but I'd wager, there WILL be only one. It's only a matter of WHEN, and it's definitively not an IF.

For those who fight on good side of the force, I have only one word for advice (or is it three?): "peer-to-peer". Stick with this notion deeply incepted in your mind and we'll be safe enough. NrÂș1 enemies? Anything that qualifies as a "walled-gardens" ;-)
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