Several of my tech savvy professors used twitter for class updates (e.g., PowerPoint slide deck for #LAW101 is now uploaded…). One of them, seemingly instantaneously with sending out these tweets, would email the class with the identical text.
My theory is that by using that particular hash tag, he triggered whatever tweeting software he has to automatically send out an email to a particular mailing list, in that case our class list.
Am I imagining this? Is there such a program? Is there something that would approximate this? I have a weird hodgepodge of twitter addresses, email addresses and Facebook accounts for my softball team. If I could just send weather/game updates to twitter via SMS, and then have it simultaneously be sent out as an email, that would be awesome.
Thanks in advance!
There are services that allow you to send tweets by email, so he might have been doing that.
Twitter’s API is dead-simple, even a hobbiest could bang out an app like that in a couple hours max.
But because Twitter’s API is dead-simple, it’s probably even easier to find a site where someone else has already done it… there’s also the “If This Than That” framework/service which might be smart enough to filter tweets by hashtag, but I don’t know for sure.
I’m thinking maybe he was doing the reverse of what you are thinking. He sent out the email to the class plus a tweet-via-email service (like this one) so that emails arrived at the same time as the tweet. The hashtag was just included in the text of the email, so it was also included in the tweet.
Hmmm…dang. I would have liked the inverse, if only because I find it easier to text than to send emails, in part because I’ve gone crazy with my data so far, and I suck at organizing email lists.