[jawns]

I've been using Twilert for at least a year now, and it works fairly well.

It should be noted, though, that the basic functionality that Twilert provides -- email alerts when a particular word or phrase appears in a tweet -- is pretty trivial to roll on your own using the Twitter API.

[extesy]

I don't know their implementation but I can think of two workarounds for the firehose issue:

1. Paid approach: use some authorized firehose data resellers. That's expensive, but if there are already thousands of users, that will pay off.

2. Free approach: use poll-based solution to search for the keyword every X seconds/minutes. When new tweet appears in the search results after the last recorded tweet - that's your new tweet. This way it shouldn't miss anything and you don't need firehose. Of course, to overcome request throttling limits, you'll need to use multiple different credentials.

[danmaz74]

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