Some months ago, unfortunately Twitter stopped the delivery of SMS messages to international numbers that were outside of the US and Canada. Since then, there have been several startups that offer the delivery of your Twitter message, but sadly not for free. Twe2 however, helps you fill your twitter-less void, and for free.

Before we continue, you’re probably asking, how can they do this for free? To do so, they’ve had to include ads at the bottom of your messages. But that’s it. I haven’t been charged any nasty fees, or got spammed with random messages, nothing.
The ads aren’t miles long or intrusive, and this is what your messages will look like;

This is a direct message from tweetmanager, followed by the message and the advertisement.

Once you’ve signed up and received your confirmation code, login to your dashboard and set up as you want. From the control panel, you can choose what messages get delivered to your phone, and when. You probably won’t want to be woken at 3am Monday morning.

Apart from sending direct messages to your phone, it can also send you your replies, as well as any search term you desire. For example, you might want to receive all messages from @TWAU on your mobile phone; simply put from:TWAU in the search term box. It supports all the options supported by Twitter Search.

If you’re not comfortable handing out your twitter details, Twe2 have also announced their inclusion in the OAuth beta, so soon you won’t need to share your password with them.

So, how well does it really work? In my opinion, brilliant. If someone sends me a direct message, it’ll be right there on my phone minutes later. It’s not quite instant, but quicker than checking my email every 15 minutes for my direct messages. Only real downside that I’ve noticed that you can’t text back in reply to the message. This isn’t a huge problem, considering the price of international text messages sent from Australia.

Overall, I really enjoy Twe2 and I hope they stick around for months to come.

You can find Twe2 at http://twe2.com/ and also on Twitter; @twe2.