A few weeks ago, my old employer had a nice weekend away in Dublin – coinciding with my last day of employment. (They flew me out, then threatened to leave me there. How we laughed.)

If you’re taking a lot of people out somewhere for a, er, training weekend, then it’s quite fun to be able to be able to continue to communicate with each other when you’re split up and around the city. So, I idly thought it might be quite fun to knock something up using text messages. So I did.

First, I thought about using the station’s able text system, run by BT Agile. It’s a tremendously versatile texting platform, and there’s no doubt that it would have been capable of it. There was one teensy-weensy drawback: cost. Let’s assume 20 people subscribed to this service, and it costs us 7p per message to send (it doesn’t), that would be a cost of £1.40p every time someone sent a message. Alternatively, I could have charged people to receive these messages. Or, perhaps not.

So, my thoughts then went to Twitter. Twitter’s all well and good, but if you’re a group of 80, everyone would need to register to everyone else’s Twitter feed to make a simple application where you can shout out to everyone in your group. This wasn’t going to work. But I quite liked the cost of using Twitter’s free texting facility. So I wondered whether there was a way of using the benefit of the shortcode’s flexibility, and the distribution of Twitter.

So, here’s how we did it.

1. I registered a user called something like TRAININGWEEKEND at Twitter.
2. We gave people instructions to register (send ‘FOLLOW TRAININGWEEKEND’) to Twitter’s SMS number. (If they weren’t already registered, it coped well).
3. I set up a keyword on our shortcode using BT Agile, so that when anyone sent a message to our shortcode starting ‘TRAININGWEEKEND’, the message called a webpage.
4. I wrote some simple code on that webpage to reformat the message and send it to Twitter, as an update for the user ‘TRAININGWEEKEND’.

Voila. Send a message to one number (at a standard rate), and it sends it to everyone. For free. Nice.

So, did anyone use it?

Well, over half of the company registered: the Twitter list ended with 38 people. And they used it tremendously. Some of the cleaner updates were…

• Party in room 210 be there
• Is anyone still at St. Stephens Green? It’s taking forever in a taxi!
• A few. Some are going for beers nearby.
• Roger has taken Sally to his room to ‘charge her phone’
• Always thought she was pay as you go

… 253 updates in total, which is over 5 updates an hour during the weekend. Which in SMS charges, assuming a cost of 7p outgoing, is £672.98.

Thank you Twitter, we had a blast.

(You want my hacked-together Twitter code?)

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