Posted on 08-08-2007 under howto

Wanna keep up with the latest news on your mobile phone? Read on for the very simple way to do this and it doesn’t cost you a cent. Okay so you do have to send a message to a UK number when you register (only once) but thats all.

What you do is, you sign up for a free account on Twitter, then register your phone number. They’ll ask you to send a message to a number in the UK after which you should start receiving messages from Twitter.

The basic idea behind Twitter is that you can write something on the site, and all of your friends and followers will automatically receive your message. Once you’ve registered you’re phone on Twitter you can direct your messages to your phone.

Fine till here, but what about getting freshly baked news? Here’s where this little site called twitterfeed comes in. Twitterfeed allows you to set up any RSS feed to send notifications to Twitter. (If you’ve just crawled from under a rock, look up RSS first). So whatever news source you want, all you have to do is create a notification feed for it. More details about the process are on twitterfeed if you want to set up your own RSS feeds.

But you’re probably looking for the big news sites like BBC, CNN etc. Chances are, feeds have already been created on twitter for these sites. All you have to “follow” them on twitter, and you’ll start receiving their news feeds.

Here are some feeds to get you going:

Theres also stuff other than news, on twitter. For example, this is a good idea

If you find any more twitter links, please put them in the comments.

Be warned though. These sites update very often, and you’ll find yourself running out of message space on your phone very quickly. I have had more than 50 messages on my phone on some occasions. Especially if you were to turn your phone off for a while and then turn it back on again, you’ll get flooded. Do change your message ringtone to something less annoying because you’re going to hear it a lot. Also, deleting Twitter messages as you read them is a good tactic for controlling memory consumption. You can also limit your subscribed feeds to what you absolutely need. For example BBC South Asia generates much less traffic than Dawn News. And sometimes Dawn News repeats itself.

Also, these news reports will only be headlines. Sometimes there are a few words from the body of the news article and the rest is cut off. There is however a link at the end of the message, that you can follow, if your phone has GPRS, for the full story.

Thats it. Now you’ve got news on the go. And you don’t have to pay more than Rs.10 for the registration SMS. Enjoy.