Using Twitter for System Notifications

I finally figured out something that many, many people have been doing for quite a while - using Twitter as a way to deliver notification of system events.

Twitter is a great way to deliver short messages to many people via many forms of media and devices. The default is that any message is available to anyone in the world. But you can also configure a Twitter account to be private, requiring the owner to explicitly allow access to other users. In the extreme case the owner can deny access to none but him or her self.

Twitter handles all the messaging, all you need to do is have your server, web application or whatever, send a message to your private account whenever some event takes place. For example, I run long calculations on servers at work and I want to be notified when a job completes.

You can find a load of UNIX command line twitter clients and libraries in all the main languages. So finding or building a suitable client is straightforward.

I'll show you how to build a simple client in Ruby.

If you want to send tweets to a private account then you will need proper authentication credentials.

For this you need to use OAuth - username/password authentication has been deprecated.

1: Sign in to Twitter as the owner of the private account
2: Go to http://dev.twitter.com - you'll still be signed in
3: Click on 'Register an App' - now you're not really creating a new twitter application but pretend that you are - give it a name - and you want to select that it is a 'client' application and that it should have 'read write' access to the account.
4: Now go to 'your apps' and click on the new dummy app.
5: Scroll down and get the 'Consumer key' and 'Consumer secret' - you'll need these in your code.
6: Those are required for your application, but in addition you need a key and secret for the actual twitter account that you will want to write to.
7: On your app settings page, on the right sidebar, click on 'My Access Token' and get 'Access Token (oauth_token)' and 'Access Token Secret (oauth_token_secret)'.

Now we can write some code.

8: Get the 'twitter' Ruby gem

$ gem install twitter

9: Write a small ruby app. This simple example takes a message on the command line, configures the client with the FOUR OAuth tokens/strings and then updates the private twitter account with the message:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'twitter'
abort "Usage: #{$0} message" if ARGV.length == 0
# Hard-wired to my private twitter account
Twitter.configure do |config|
  config.consumer_key = 'your-app_key'
  config.consumer_secret = 'your_app_secret'
  config.oauth_token = 'your_account_token'
  config.oauth_token_secret = 'your_account_secret'
end
client.update(ARGV[0])

10: It's that simple...
11: chmod a+x your script and run it with a message - check your private twitter account and you should see it.

It's easy to think up (and code) custom notification scripts for this. As long as you have a network and as long as Twitter is up (OK, it has had some issues) then you don't need to worry about anything to do with distributing your messages. You can get them on your phone or your desktop, and you can leverage the work of others to display popup windows on your desktop, play tunes, flash lights, etc, etc.

Just remember that when you create your private Twitter account that you go into the settings and make sure that it is indeed set to private.

One extension that I've thought about is having my script take an optional URL, say pointing to the results from a computational run, and using a URL shorting service like http://bit.ly or http://goo.gl to let me include that in the tweet. Unfortunately none of the 'big name' services allow you to have private URLs so that might be a problem in some applications. But it's worth considering for some applications.