Setting up a Private Twitter Channel or Twitter Group

Last few days me and my friends where trying to setup a twitter channel for our group. We wanted this one to be personal sms chat group. All group members will get the tweets posted to this channel.They will also be able to post tweets to group. And as far as possible outsider should not be able to get any tweets. And 100% no spamming by outsider. Yesterday we finalized our solution. This may not be the best way to do it. But it works (it has its own problems too). In this solution we use twitter and third party services but we have not coded a single line of code. And hence it is for non geeks too. Here are the steps:

• Setup a twitter account and make tweets private. This is our channel tweet from whom we will be getting tweets.
• Get the direct message atom feed. This is not straight you need to use their api url. You can get the feed using the url below. Note the password and userid are part of url. Not the safest way but it works. http://userid:[email protected]/direct_messages.atom
• Now feed this to twitterfeed.com to msg to channel as soon as possible. TwitterFeed is a service which takes a feed and posts the title and content as tweet to a given id.
• To get the messages from the channel follow the channel.
• To post the messages you need to send a direct message to channel and for that channel should be following you. So ask the admin of channel to add you as a friend.
• Now just send a d channel message to send the message to the group

Known problems:

• Messages are delayed by half an hour because twitterfeed wakes up only at half an hour interval.
• The broadcast messages does not have the senders id. So the sender has to identify himself seaparately.
• May not be the safest way to implement a channel

What next:
Use the twitter Apis and write your own mashup do the same in a better way. Thanks to anarahari for the implementation and testing. wesleyneo and prsn for all the brainstorming tweets.

Further read:
Refer Twitter Fan Wiki for other API implementations and projects and here is the proposal for the twitter channel tag.