Facebook, finally with SMS notifications

I just saw this pop up in my account - Facebook will let us use SMS as an alert-based service. Interesting.

From what I've gathered right now, you can get alerts for wall posts, pokes, comments, inbox messages and a few other things. Oh, and if you want, you can subscribe to someone's status feed by typing in their name either via SMS or the web interface.

The service works with Warid, Mobilink and Telenor in Pakistan. I'm sure they have support for other operators abroad.

And this comes amid my decreased usage of Facebook. Interesting, indeed.

Ufone's blocked Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo... great going!

In a recently-discovered scheme, Ufone customers aren't able to get email from their Gmail, Hotmail nor Yahoo email accounts. Not sure why, though these three companies are quite popular worldwide (it should be noted that Gmail recently took over AOL in terms of subscribers, so clearly, it's not on which company's popular. The method of receiving email over cellphones is by forwarding/composing a message to a unique email address alloted to your phone (in other words, an email-to-SMS gateway). 


ProPakistani writes

Ufone has also blocked Gmail from their ‘Email To SMS Service’. So! technically speaking; now people who use Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo can’t send Email to SMS messages to their buddies.

 So far, Zong hasn't blocked it. Could it be a glitch?

You can read the full article here.

Twitter users in Pakistan can now tweet and receive tweets!

I came across this website, Mob2weet, which lets users in Pakistan use Twitter via SMS over their cellphone - all for the price of a typical SMS cost. The website provides the service for free, but outgoing SMS rates apply.

It's pretty simple - they haven't used 0Auth yet (which is Twitter's authorization system, but they expect to by tomorrow i.e. 19th August 2009) but you can safely sign in with your credentials.

Here's how it works briefly: you send an sms with your registration details to a specific number (they have network specific numbers, but you're free to choose which number you pick) and once your registration is confirmed, you'll get all tweets from your Home screen.

Don't want to receive updates from a specific user? Send "off " to the number, and those alerts will be turned off. Sending "off" will disable all alerts.

You can even DM your fellow friends, and receive them too.

I know this service will help reduce the SMS email costs that I have to pay Telenor - since it's a perfectly good alternative to receiving news on your cellphone for free.

So far, all networks are supported, but the code for Telenor subscribers isn't up yet (you can use another telco's number instead - since it won't make a difference).

The website isn't much - it only gives you instructions. I guess they're trying to get the SMS service up and running first, then possibly make a front-end later on. But it definitely looks promising (and I went WOOHOO! on Twitter today). They're also on Twitter too!