Track Twitter Replies in Your Email Without Giving Your Password To Spammers
Twply.com has been spreading over Twitter the past couple days as a simple service to email you @replies from Twitter. The service has come under fire for forcing users to send a tweet when they sign up, but to me there’s a more important issue. In order to use the service you must give them your Twitter username and password, and they must store it unencrypted. The site was recently sold for $1,200, passwords and all. Everyone should know to not give out their passwords, and sites like this encourage people to break that rule (a rule I made sure to enforce when developing TrackThis).
There is a fairly simple way to track these messages without giving up your password. You can easily subscribe to @replies or mentions of you on Twitter using the official Twitter Search. Just search for:
pb30 -from:pb30
Replace pb30 with your name of course. You can subscribe to the feed on the right in your RSS reader or by email using a service like RSSFwd.com or Simply Headlines. There is one issue with this approach, replies from people who protect their updates will not be visible.
I previously used TweetBeep.com to track mentions of me or my projects, but they are apparently having some recent server trouble.
