Yahoo! Messenger Blog

Send and receive tweets in Y! Messenger with TweetSwitch

January 8, 2010 on 2:53 pm | In Other services | 2 Comments

As you may know, Yahoo! Messenger 10 has a Y! Updates tab that lets you view your contacts in context of their latest updates. Those updates can range from their latest Messenger status update to the song they’re listening to on last.fm, or even their latest Twitter message.

While Yahoo! Messenger does not yet support the ability to send out tweets from within the program to your followers, or to receive the tweets of all the people you’re following (unless they all happen to be on your Yahoo! Messenger contact list), there are some other services that can enable this feature for you.

This week I learned about a new service called TweetSwitch that allows you to send and receive your Twitter messages within your IM program. They call themselves a “message forwarding service” for Twitter and they support a variety of IM programs, including Yahoo! Messenger.

Here’s how it works… First, you go to their website and click the “Sign in with Twitter” button. You’ll then be taken to a page on Twitter where you can sign in and link your Twitter account with the TweetSwitch service. After logging in, you’re redirected back to TweetSwitch where you can add the IM service on which you want to be able to send and receive tweets. Choose Yahoo! Messenger, then just type in your Yahoo! ID.

Note that the interface for linking your IM with TweetSwitch is a little wonky – you have to click the blue add (+) icon, add your ID, and then drag the Y! icon into the Step 1 box. When it’s completed, you’ll see a “Perfect!” completion message. If you want to also receive direct messages and replies/mentions from Twitter, be sure to configure the DMs and Mentions sections too.

After setup, you’ll be prompted within Yahoo! Messenger to confirm TweetSwitch as a friend. It will show up in your contact list and when you want to send tweets, you can click on it to get started. Similarly when tweets come in, they come in as IM messages from TweetSwitch.

From that point on, whenever you’re logged into Yahoo! Messenger (even on your mobile phone), any tweets that you normally see in your Twitter feed from those you’re following, as well as replies or retweets to your own messages, will show up as a message in an IM window. Receive all types or pick and choose what to receive – TweetSwitch lets you specify.

TweetSwitch allows you to send tweets out to your followers using a variety of commands. To start a new tweet, double click on your TweetSwitch contact, and type in “tweet” followed by your message. Then just hit Send the same way you’d send an IM message. To direct message someone type “dm [recipient's twitter ID]” followed by your tweet message. To see your last 20 tweets, type in “list / l”.

And if the deluge of tweets becomes too much, you can easily stop and start the service when needed. Just send your TweetSwitch contact the “stop” command; you’ll soon see a message confirming that service has been suspended. This doesn’t prevent you from sending or reading tweets elsewhere, it just suspends the TweetSwitch service from bringing them to you in Yahoo! Messenger. Similarly, message “start” and you’ll be up and running again.

I originally learned about TweetSwitch from a TechCrunch article. When I tried it a few days ago, there were some lags in the service, presumably because they got a quick flood of people trying it out. It is still in alpha mode so don’t expect perfection. But if you’d like to start receiving and sending your tweets within Yahoo! Messenger, TweetSwitch offers an easy way to do it.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager