New Twitter Feature: DM Email Responses
I’ve had a pet peeve with Twitter for awhile, and I know it can be fixed via an app that implements the Twitter API. So, I’m going to outline the app here in hopes that one of you all out there gets inspired (or is bored enough) to write it. But, if no one steps up, then I’m sure I’ll get around to hacking it together myself.
Whenever I receive a Direct Message (DM) email notification from Twitter, I want to be able to hit “reply” and respond to the DM right there. But, currently Twitter doesn’t support that… you have to click-through a link to send a DM back on Twitter’s site.
Here’s the spec: poll Twitter fairly regularly (say, once an hour) to see if you have any DMs. If you do, then generate an email to the owner of the Twitter account with the content of the DM using a unique email address (just like Disqus comment emails). The recipient can then respond to the email, and the response will be DM’d back via Twitter. Also, users of this service should tell Twitter to stop sending emails with their DMs to them so they don’t get two emails about the same DM.
It would require a cronjob, some light hacking on an email server, and a few lines of scripting to send/receive emails and talk to Twitter. Did someone already build this? If not, go to it Internetizens.
kortina’s bit: ++ for this idea!!
