Get me started....can Twitter do what I'm about to attempt?

[Duane Morin]

Hi,

Sorry for the complete newb question to follow, maybe somebody can
gently kick me in the right direction if it's been asked a zillion
times.

I work for a company whose product connects high school kids and
colleges, and one thing I'm asked time and time again is what it would
take to get an SMS notification system in place, so for instance if a
college expressed interest in a certain student we'd ping that student
"Hey, Boston College is looking at you!" or something.

I'm wondering I can circumvent some of the SMS issues by going with
the Twitter API. Say that my company published its Twitter identity,
and allowed users to start following us (stop me if I get the
terminology wrong!). These are not public messages that we broadcast,
though, and there's the thing I'm most wondering about. If
LittleBilly is following me on Twitter, can I

a) know when a user has started following me, so that I can send him a
welcome message and send him instructions on how to link his existing
account to his Twitter identity, and

b) send a message directly to LittleBilly?

If he wants to then forward it off to his friends, all the better, but
I couldn't presume to do that for him. Our use of the system would
never (well, almost never) be of the "Here's what we're doing, and
anybody who is following us can read it" variety - it's more "here's
what's happening on our system that is relevant to you, you single
person you."

Is that a valid use of the platform, or am I working against the
current on this one? I'm reading the technical docs now but I thought
maybe if I'm way off base at this high level I shouldn't bother
getting too deep into it.

Thanks!!

[Alex Payne]

a) Yes, you can get an email whenever a user follows you.

b) You can only send messages directly to users who are following you
(opt-in, to prevent spam). You can post an @reply to that user
whether or not they're following you, though. Doing so for marketing
purposes is a good way to annoy people enough that they block you and
signal to us that you're a spammer, though.

If you want to find people talking about your institution, check out
our new Search API: http://search.twitter.com/api

--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

[Duane Morin]

Thanks Alex! Most definitely not for marketing purposes at all. Heck
if I build this thing and my management makes me use it for spamming
I'd be happy if you shut us down :). We're just looking for ways to
get the information out to the kids in the method that's most
convenient for them. I'll need to think of a mechanism to map a user
in my system to his Twitter credentials, because those are the only
people to whom we'll have anything useful to send. I want them to
voluntarily decide to follow us, but I do need to know who they are so
that I can send them useful stuff.