Cobalt Edge

All of the server monitors I have setup, but most importantly, the ones for DealBase, will send me an SMS if there's a problem.  I also get Hoptoad exception notifications via SMS for DealBase.  These are things that are timely, and important.  I'd had one bad case where the servers were reporting down (they weren't actually, was a DNS issue), and this wound up unfortunately setting me up to be hyper-vigilant in checking SMS.  Unfortunate stress and worry.

However, what compounded this was that I was getting some tweets (friends mostly) via SMS.  Well, obviously, the tweets far outnumbered any actual server issues, but due to the above vigilance about checking SMS's, these tweets would make my phone ding and make me immediately worry, "did the server go down?!"  I wound up starting to cut down whose tweets got sent via SMS.  But during this, I also realized that I actually didn't want any tweets via SMS unless they were a "direct" or a "mention".  If they weren't, I'd just read them when going through my regular Twitter feed.  However, Twitter doesn't have an option for just getting any directs or mentions via SMS (they really should).  That led to Boxcar...

Boxcar is a fantastic iPhone app that monitors your Twitter (or Facebook, and other things) stream for directs or mentions, and sends you push notifications when one is found.  It's fast, staying extremely current with your feed, and works great.  With this addition, I've been able to off SMS for everyone I follow on Twitter.  I've been doing this now for about a week, and realized this morning how liberating it has been!  

Normally, I would wake up, instantly check my phone (which serves as my nightstand alarm clock now, thanks to the excellent Kensington Nightstand Charging Dock - click the little photo icon to see how it'll look in use), to see if any server down SMS messages came in that I didn't hear while sleeping.  Usually I'd have a few SMS messages, which would instantly raise my stress level, only to pretty much always find they were tweets.  With Boxcar, now my mornings are great.  I still check my phone of course, but yep, no SMS's anymore.

So thank you Boxcar, great product!  While I can't more heartily recommend Boxcar, I'll point out Prowl which some folks also recommended.  My main issue with Prowl is that it requires an always on Mac to grab whatever data you want as a push notification, and send it to the Prowl servers.  There are workarounds for some things for this, but it was just way more hassle and such than I wanted, for what I needed.  But, you may find it useful if you have data you want as a push notification that you don't have another way to get.