No. Unfortunately it's not free. But from as little as 5p per message, we think you'll agree it's pretty good value for money considering most UK networks charge at least twice that on Pay as you Talk (PAYT) tariffs.
For security and flexibility. On the other twitter->SMS websites we've noticed that you sign up with your twitter username and password. If you change your password in twitter, it breaks a couple of them. Our system adds, verifies and stores your separate twitter credentials once you've logged in. This also prevents folks signing up with other people's twitter usernames and has the added bonus of allowing you to access different twitter accounts using the same hootSMS account and credits.
All hootSMS passwords are MD5 encrypted with value added salt!
You can receive updates every 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes, 3 hours, 8 hours, or daily. It takes most SMS messages less than 3 seconds to reach any worldwide destination.
You can choose to receive any or all of the SMS update types listed below. Remember, the more types you have selected, the more SMS you'll receive and the more credit you'll use.
Direct Message: contains the complete direct message and who the sender is;
Tweet (digest mode): contains a count of how many new tweets you have. If you wish to read the messages in full you'll have to visit twitter or log into your hootSMS account or your email depending upon how you have things set up;
Tweet (individual mode): contains the complete message and the sender's name;
@Reply: contains the complete reply and the sender's name;
Follower: contains any new followers you may have adopted
To save the strain on our server, we run our automated tasks (or cron jobs) every 10 minutes. If you've set your account to poll for new messages every 20 minutes, you might be a little out of step with our batch process. Nonetheless, you should always receive your messages, at worst, within 10 minutes of your requested interval.
Here's a general checklist for troubleshooting missing SMS:
First things first. Is your mobile phone number typed correctly?
The format for all numbers is +447890123456
Where blue is your country code and the pink is your number minus the leading zero.
Yes! Although hootSMS is primarily a relay system, you can send an SMS direct to over 200 countries. Simply go to your dashboard and click on 'Send an SMS' from the options menu.
That's right. You might want to log in once in a while to top-up your credit or tweak your settings, but once you've registered and set things up how you'd like them, you can simply leave the site and it'll all happen in the background. Automagically!
Twitter only allows users a certain amount of remote queries (or API requests) per hour - usually up to 100. This is also referred to as your rate limit. If you exceed this limit, your task may not be carried out in a timely fashion.
If you reach your rate limit whilst using the hootSMS website, you can switch to 'local' mode in your settings to view the last saved updates before your rate limit was reached. This local copy of data that we store from twitter is also referred to as a cache.
Yes, our IP is white-listed. But it probably doesn't matter anyway. You see, each call we make to twitter from hootSMS is made using your twitter username and password, else we wouldn't be able to fetch your data. As such, hootSMS can only ever exceed an individual's limit and we're pretty sure that twitter can't white-list every one of our users. Because of this, we've written a smart, distributed, cached system from the ground up. If twitter falls over (as it often does due to sheer volume), our system patiently waits and carries on when twitter recovers.
Of course, if you was to log into hootSMS and refresh the page every 5 seconds, you'd no doubt exceed your limit. But we can't really see why you'd want to do that.
This feature can be used to 'reset' the details that hootSMS has stored about your twitter account. This includes an accurate count of how many messages, tweets and followers your twitter currently has. If, in the unlikely event that you're receiving duplicate SMS messages, selecting this option should sort it out.
Perhaps the best way to run hootSMS is to only poll your account once every hour and only check for new Direct Messages. However, if your settings also check for new tweets and new followers and you have a lot of activity on your twitter account, you'll obviously receive more SMS messages. Try turning off certain notifications or changing the frequency interval to poll your twitter account less often.
Unfortunately, there's no immediate work-around for this. The difficulty is that a tweet 'digest' is simply a count of all new tweets that have appeared on your twitter home page or friend timeline. As the message doesn't contain any content other than a count, it would be pointless to block them anyway.
By choosing to block a certain friend or follower via your Rules page, you can effectively stop receiving all twitter SMS updates from them. As mentioned above, if a tweet digest (with more than tweet) happens to include one of your blocked users, you'll still get the SMS. If there's more than a single tweet in your digest, it would have been despatched anyway.
This may happen if your network operator charges for termination after an SMS has been successfully received. We're investigating this at the moment and should have a solution soon! Please be aware that many network providers charge additional termination fees. The effective price is calculated by multiplication of the 'Price per Message Type' with the fee multiplier.
Due to the above-mentioned termination fees, sending an SMS to certain countries costs more than others. If you live in one of these countries or you send a direct SMS to a mobile device in one of these countries, it'll cost you more. For a full list of countries and how many credits it costs for a single SMS, see our prices page.
Again, although your SMS messages are sent in real-time, the source twitter data which feeds them have already crossed the Atlantic Ocean (twitter is based in California) in terms of time zones. If your dates and times are showing incorrectly, you may need to go into your twitter account and set your UTC offset correctly . For those in the UK, this should be zero, or GMT.
Accurate despatch times for your SMS activity will always be displayed in your logs.
This can be for a number of reasons:
You can always try manually re-synchronising your accounts - this can often fix an array (literally!) of inherent timezone quirks.
When logged in, click on the 'History' tab from the main menu. We're currently working on making the logs more comprehensive.
CET stands for Central European Time and CEST stands for Central European Summer Time. As we're operating from Europe (UK), we considered this to be the most suitable international format. CET is 1 hour ahead of the United Kingdom or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Needless to say, you'll always get your SMS within seconds of it being dispatched - no matter where you are in the world.
Not long now. Give us a while and we should have it up and running. When implemented it should effectively stop any spam messages or SMS containing flagged words from ever reaching your mobile device.
Tell us! We're intent on providing a slick, secure and reliable service. If you do come across a gremlin, please contact us, giving as much information as possible (browser, OS, scenario etc.) so we can attempt to recreate the problem at our end. Free credits to those who help to improve the service!
Well, it seems that you are currently using undetected, which is rather unusual. You may be visiting from a mobile device, PDA...or are you a machine?
hootSMS was designed with the Firefox browser in mind. You may well experience quirks if you're using Internet Explorer 6 or below (we've had to implement a few workarounds already to support this horrid, decrepit old browser). For the best (and most secure) experience on hootSMS, download and install a better browser!
We intend to add a host of additional features to further manipulate your twitter account and integrate it with a cheap, reliable and secure SMS solution. Check back regularly for updates - there'll be a few :)
