Different people use twitter for different purposes. Some use it to share interesting links with their friends, some use it to share funny jokes and some use it as their own public instant messenger, broadcasting intimate details of their life. All this was before some enterprising open source enthusiasts decided to come together and use Twitter for something even bigger – remotely controlling their PC. TweetMyPC is an open source application that lets you send commands to your PC via Twitter and instruct it to shutdown, logoff, restart, download files off the internet and a lot more. To setup TweetMyPC, download the latest version on your windows PC and run the installer.
TweetMyPC works by listening to a Twitter account for updates. I’d suggest that you create a new Twitter account for this purpose and also keep the updates on this account as private so that no one else is able to read the commands being issued. Head over to Twitter and create a new account. Login to your newly created account and click on the Settings link. On the main Account page, you will find a checkbox to protect your tweets. Check it.
Now, launch TweetMyPC and setup the application for the first time by giving it the twitter account details that you just created.
That’s all. TweetMyPC is now setup and will continue to run in the background listening for commands on the twitter account that you set, every one minute. To send a command to your PC, login to the Twitter account that TweetMyPC is listening to and write the command as a status update.
TweetMyPC will respond back with the physical memory of your PC in a tweet. The responses from TweetMyPC look something like this.
The responses come as updates to the same Twitter account and so everyone will be able to see them. This is the reason why I suggested that you protect your tweets while creating this account – You wouldn’t want anyone to look screenshots of your desktop. Yes, TweetMyPC can also take a screenshot of your desktop and upload the picture to Twitpic if you want to know what exactly is happening on your computer while you’re away.
Some other important and very useful commands that TweetMyPC supports are reboot, hibernate, getfilelist, getfile
