
- Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
Being in sales, I’m on the phone all the time. I’m calling people, people are calling me. And because I talk to so many people all over the country, I can’t tell from the number who the caller is. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could have something pop up on my screen telling me who is calling?
So I set about writing a little mashup. The number I give out is my IfByPhone number, so it’s easy to mashup with any number of services. As I’ve written about before, I’m a big fan of Twitter, so that’s what I’m choosing for my screen pop. So the technique is sending a direct tweet from an account I set up just for this purpose to my main account: khylek. I like it because I’m usually on Twitter much of the day.
When I’m away, I am still going to get an email, since I have my account set up to Email me all direct Tweets. It’s like a nice little call log.From my IfByPhone account, on all inbound calls, I call a little PHP page and pass the caller ID as a parameter. From there I look up the phone number in my contact database, and get the person’s name and company with a simple query. Here is the part of the code for sending the direct tweet.
$ch = curl_init();
$tweet= “You have a call from ” . $contact. ” of ” .$company;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,”http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml”);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “username:password”);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $mydata);
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
Before I finished this little project, I came across Mark Headd’s post on doing the same thing using Google Talk. That’s next up on my docket.





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