Howto Push Breaking News to Your Mobile

When RSS feeds first surfaced, I loved them. Instead of browsing hundreds of sites to get your daily dose of news, install/use a feedreader and get them all in one place. No adverts, just plain unadulterated news that you could control.

However that was around four years ago. Now it seems I’m too busy to even check my feedreader. If I remember I might take a look once a week, but still missed not knowing what’s going on. So my solution is simple (looks more complicated than it is), free, and possibly already well known: -

1. Get yourself signed up to Twitter. You’ll need this to use it’s free SMS text service to ‘push’ the news to your phone. I’ll call this MyTwitter for this howto.
2. Take a look at the account options to get Twitter setup with your mobile phone.
3. Create another Twitter account (say MyTwitter-News)
4. Log back into Twitter under the main MyTwitter account, and ‘follow’ the MyTwitter-News account with notifications turned on. This should result in any updates made to MyTwitter-News being sent as SMS messages to your phone.
5. Now you need to roll your news service.
6. Create an account at www.twitterfeed.com, and add in RSS feeds to the sites you want to receive updates from.  Make sure you point these to the MyTwitter-News account.  You can chose the frequency that the feeds are checked.
7. After a short time (maybe an hour or two), you should start receiving SMS messages on your mobile via your MyTwitter account, based on you following updates from your MyTwitter-News account, which in turn gets updated via the custom RSS feeds setup in twitterfeed.com.

The nice thing on the iPhone is that the SMS message contain a tinyurl link to the original article, which you can view in mobile Safari.  I’m not sure how this works with other phones.