How do you Twitter from the middle of the Atlantic?

One of the things that I suppose keeps you up in the middle of the night is the burning question: “How do you Twitter when you are in the middle of the Ocean?”  Good question and I’m glad you asked. It turns out the answer is relatively simple, but it took a long time to get to that answer.

Why Twitter From The Ocean?

One thing that is good about Twitter is that it was designed to operate with very short messages. It’s bandwidth requirements are circa 1983. This just happens to be the bandwidth that you can expect out in the middle of the ocean. So it fits right in with our bandwidth availability. Another thing is that you can broadcast to many people at the same time. No pesky email lists. Your friends and fans can just check out your updates. They can even have their updates sent to their cell phone so they can always know what you are up too.

Okay, You’ve Sold me, but how do I do it?

The devil is in the details. The first obvious thing you might think of is using a satellite phone to text message updates directly to twitter. Heck, they have an international number that you can text too, so it should just work … right?  Of course, not. The problem is that twitter changed the way that you register phones with their service. It used to be that you just typed in your number on their web site and you were good to go. Now it requires a complex back and forth handshake between your cell phone and their servers. That’s great if you are in one of their supported countries, but doesn’t even come close to working for everyone else in the world. And what if I’m a cheapskate and only have a SSB connection?The secret is to use your email to post a twitter update. First you need to enable an email relay such as twittermail. Once you sign up they will give you a relay email address (foobar@twittermail.com). To twit you simple send an email message to your relay address. Make sure the message is all text.

And finally

As an added bonus, you can send your location using this message-> L: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=18.426,-64.61. North Latitude is a positive number, South is negative. East Longitude is positive and West Longitude is negative. Click the link, and it will bring up the current location of Indigo.
ciao,
andy

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