Twitter, a latest social website has got the attention of the whole world in the short time of its existence. Most of us, use the services provided by twitter in a regular basic. Though our purposes are different some use it to share funny jokes, to share interesting/important links with our friends, and some use it as their own public instant messenger, and last but not the least use of it is broadcasting intimate details of our life. Now you are going to learn a new and interesting feature of twitter. If you forget to shut down your PC while leaving your home or office, or you want to know what you child is doing with your computer or you want to show some one any spacial photo/file, don’t worry at all.You can use Twitter for something even bigger – remotely controlling your PC. You can even remotely take the  screen shot of your desktop.

Control Windows PC by Twitter

To initiate the process first, you have to download an application TweetMyPC. It is an open source application(Freeware) that lets you send commands to your PC via Twitter and instruct it to  restart, logoff, shutdown, download files off the internet and a lot more. Download the latest version of TweetMyPC

After downloading it, install in your PC. Step-by-step screen-shots are given bellow for your assistance.

[Note-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.]
After completing the installation what you have to do is to create a new twitter account. Create a new Twitter  account.
In the setting page you will find a check box to protect your Tweets. Check it on.Now Login to your newly created Twitter account. And go to the settings link On the main page.

Click on “Save” and you will be asked for you account password, just enter it.

After doing this, run TweetMyPC and setup the application for the first time by giving it the twitter account details.

Now click on “Save and Hide”. It will make the application ready for the job.

After this TweetMyPC is now ready and will continue to run in the background. Whenever any command  will be sent through the twitter account that you set, that will be executed in your PC. TweetMyPC listens commands from your Twitter account in very one minute. So send a command to your PC  is log-in to the Twitter account that TweetMyPC is listening to and write the command as a status update.

TweetMyPC will respond back with the message that it is work station is logging off(in this case) . The responses from TweetMyPC look something like this.

Previously, I recommended you to create a new twitter account for this purpose and suggested  you protect your tweets while creating this account because the responses come as updates to the same Twitter account and so everyone will be able to see them. You wouldn’t want anyone to look screen shots of your desktop. Yes, TweetMyPC can also take a screen shot 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 Useful Commands:

Now I am going to share some other important and very useful commands that TweetMyPC supports. Those are

reboot, hibernate, getfilelist,  getfile <filepath>, standby, hibernate, screen-shot (to take the screenshot of your remote computer), download <url>(to download a file to your PC when you  are away).Custom Command(If you manually want to create a commandthen it is useful.just choose a command and select a fileto run ) 

Control MAC from Twitter

Same as TweetMyPC in windows PC, in case of MAC you can use the free application TweetMyMac to control your Mac. It also allows  you to shutdown and restart  your computer,open a torrent, take a screen shot, and more.

In this case, the process is smiler to the previous one, i.e in case of windows PC. Here also You are recommended to use a fresh twitter account.

To initiate the process, at first download TweetMyMac application and install it.

secondly, create a new twitter account. Protect it by changing account setting like previous one.

Run TweetMyMac application and fill up it with twitter details like you did for Windows. Now it is ready for the job and after that it will continue to run in the background listening for commands on the twitter account that you set.

Commands for TweetMyMac

shutdown(Shutdown your Mac. Will NOT save any open files);restart(Restart your Mac.Will NOT save any open files); logout(Logout of your Mac. Will NOT save any open files);sleep(Sleep your Mac); screenshot(Get a screen shot ofyour Mac. Your Mac will reply with the picture postedon TwitPic); isight(Snap an image from your Mac’s iSightcamera. Your Mac will reply  with the picture posted onTwitPic); %[command](Your Mac will execute the customshell command. Note: this is disabled  by default for security and must be enabled in the options to use);torrent [torrent URL](Your Mac will download the torrentand open it in the default torrent client.) etc

Access Facebook Twitter Directly from Windows Start Menu

If you are a huge Facebook and Twitter user then you can get rid from the boring task like opening your browser then typing the Facebook or Twitter address every time. You can access Facebook or Twitter by a single click directly from your Windows start menu. Not only for Facebook or Twitter, you can apply this trick for any website.

Here is the step by step guide to pin Facebook, Twitter or any website shortcut in Windows 7, XP start menu.

Pin Facebook or Twitter in Windows 7 start menu

1. At first right-click on an empty space of the desktop and choose New > Shortcut.
2. In the “Create shortcut” dialogue box type the url “http://www.facebook.com/”. You can add any website address. Click on “Next”.
3. Give a name of the shortcut, here “Facebook”.
4. Now drag the shortcut icon and drop it in to the start menu. If you try to drop the shortcut to the start menu after clicking on the Start icon in Windows 7 then you will fail. So at first left-click on the “Facebook” shortcut icon, hold down the left mouse button and then press the Win key from the key board; now drag and drop the shortcut into the start menu.

You are done! You can directly open Facebook or any of your favorite website directly from Widows 7 start menu.

In the above method you will have to keep the shortcut at your desktop. But if you don’t want to keep more things in your desktop then you can create the shortcut at any location. The best place to create the shortcut is the Windows Start menu folder.

To open start menu folder in Windows 7 type the following path at the Windows 7 start menu search box

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Now create the shortcut as the same way that I mentioned before. The shortcut will appear at Start menu > All Programs.

But that is not the place that we exactly want. We do like to see the shortcut under the Start menu. For that, just go to Start menu > All Programs, right-click on the shortcut “Facebook”, drag it to the link “Back” (it will be highlighted), wait for a while; you will be back to the start menu list. Now place the shortcut at start menu.

Don’t like the icon? Let us change the icon picture.

Right-click on “Facebook” and select “Properties”. Under “Web Document” tab click on “Change icon”.

Copy the path C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll and replace the existing one at the box then hit enter.

Now select the icon picture and click “OK” then “Apply”.

By the same way you can create a shortcut for Twitter and the other  favorite websites as well. Though I have describe the method for Windows 7, you can get the same in your Windows XP. The procedure is almost same.