Friday, February 22, 2008

Twitter for Google Apps, plus restoring SMS updates

I had two problems with Twitter:

1. I wanted to be able to receive IMs via my own Google Apps domain (instead of my account at gmail.com).

I found the solution over at kavinda.net. To summarize,

a. Add the following entries to your domain's DNS (replacing example.com with your domain name, of course):

_xmpp-client._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk4.l.google.com.

_xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

_jabber._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.example.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.


b. Give your changes time to propagate, e.g 24 hours;

c. Login to Twitter and add your Google Apps IM account to your device (I chose Jabber, IIRC). Take note of the generated password;

d. Add twitter@twitter.com to your buddies. If it doesn't immediately show up as a visible user, your DNS changes haven't propagated enough (i.e. the old version is still cached at Twitter's nameservers);

e. Send it the password from c above. That's it!


2. Perhaps due to my diddling of the notification settings, I was no longer receiving any SMS updates. While IM is great, I'm not always at the computer (rigggghhhttt...).

Here's how to fix it (YMMV):

a. Make sure that "phone"
is selected under Notifications at http://twitter.com/home;

b. Double-check that notifications for your mobile phone is set to "On"
at http://twitter.com/devices;

c. Add a PIN (most likely not required, but useful anyway to prevent spoofing);

d. Send "on" to Twitter's mobile number.

That should do the trick! (Thanks to Gari for the test twitters, hehe.)

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