As every seasoned Twitter user in Singapore knows, while one can update his Twitter account via SMS, since October 2008, one cannot get sms updates via Twitter (not for free anyway).

Savvy Singaporean Twitter users know of services like TweetSG and Widgeo, which allows you to sms a Singaporean number instead of the international number. But unfortunately, there is no way to get updates from Twitter via SMS.

No way until now at least. Enter SgBEAT . On the surface SgBEAT looks kind of pointless, it’s a Twitter clone set up for Singapore with perhaps one extra feature the ability to send pictures via MMS.

It also includes one interesting feature for Singapore users, it allows you to receive free sms @s and dms sent to SgBEAT after you activate your phone, by choosing “edit personal profile”

and then linking to your phone by sending an sms to a number with a “secret code” proving that you are owner of that number.

After that you can receive “beats” from people on SgBEAT , as well as “beat” by sending sms to that number (or sending pictures by mms)

Okay but even that doesn’t sound too exciting since not many people are on SgBEAT. But the recently released Twitter reverse link (which I was fortunate enough to get to trial before hand ), means that if anyone on twitter sends you a reply, or dms you it will not only be reflected on sgbeat, but you will also be sent an sms!

You will need to link your Twitter account to your sgbeat account first of course.

click on “edit” and then turn on the options to import tweets from Twitter

When it’s done, anything you post on Twitter will go to sgbeat and vice-versa. But more importantly, you get sms alerts when someone replies to you or sends you a direct message from either Twitter or SgBEAT!

Obviously, from the library point of view, it has the potential of becoming a cheap SMS reference service tool. Once setup, a user can tweet @nuslibraries via sms, and when nuslibraries replies via DM or @ , the reply will be pushed to the user’s phone via sms.

It’s not as good as NLB’s SMS reference service but it’s free. One limitation is that initially you get only 10 updates per day.

Incidentally at least one of the the founders of Sgbeat is a current student of my institution National University of Singapore.