Jason Wieland, CEO of Notify.me, sat down with me last week to give me some info for my StartupSD.net post on his San Diego startup. It’s a nifty little site that is taking on the likes of Alerts.com with push notifications. You can read the full article for more information on the startup, but here’s a little tidbit that is worth paying attention to—Notify.me offers Twitter users a nice little hack to receive tweets via IM. Here’s how (it’s easier than it looks):

1. Sign up with Notify.me. They’re in private beta, but Wieland gave me this link to share with StartupSD readers and you.

2. Go to the Account tab and select “Destinations.” Follow the steps to configure IM as a desitination.

3. Use FreeMyFeed to get an RSS feed for your Twitter updates. Enter – http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss into the feed url text box. Also enter your Twitter username and password.

4. Copy the output URL.

5. Navigate back to Notify.me and select “Sources” from the Account options.

6. Paste the URL in the Feed textbox and click “Add Feed.”

If you do nothing else, you’ll receive all your Twitter friends’ updates via IM, but if you’d like to filter the tweets you receive you can either exclude keywords (like twitter usernames) or include keywords (like jbruin, sdtweetup, and “san diego” to track a filtered subset of tweets. It works really well and it’s about 1 – 2 minutes faster per notification than the TwitterSpy/GoogleTalk work around. So go have fun!

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