twply.com: Why Not Use RSS Instead? - Technology Evangelist

The new Twitter related service, twply.com, got some buzz yesterday for the overly viral nature of their setup process where people who've yet to actually use the service spam out a Tweet to their followers telling them how great the service is.

The service sends any @replies you receive on Twitter to you via email. Twitter, by default, only offers to do this for direct tweets, to this add-on service does have some value.

However, I imagine that a huge percentage of Twitter users are also RSS reader users. This being the case, why not just get your @replies delivered to Google Reader or the RSS reader of your choice? Why in the world would you want to clog up your inbox with more messages?

To do this, go to search.twitter.com and search for your username. This will give you a list of all tweets where you've been mentioned, including tweets you've sent. If you'd like to filter yourself out, add "-from:edkohler" to the query (that is, if your username is edkohler).

Then grab the feed along the upper right hand part of the page.

Problem solved. Inbox is still clean. No need for twply.com.

Just one thing. If the person who replies to you has his/her tweets protected (not in the public timeline), do they still show up in this RSS feed?

I just have a bookmark to my @perfectporridge search URL on search.twitter.com that I check a few times a day.

However, twply appeals to me for the following situation: 1) I'm traveling and on blackberry only, 2) I'm in a GSM-area that doesn't allow my blackberry's browser nor RSS reader to work, or 3) I don't want to run my RSS application just to check on Twitter @-replies, and 4) http://tweetbeep.com/ is slow, unreliable (or like today, down altogether).

We'll see how fast twply is. I want it to be immediate like RSS. TweetBeep is far from immediate.

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