Building an Unconference App For RailsConf with Twilio and Twitter` is a story about how the organizers of BohConf at RailsConf 2012 in Austin, Texas used Twilio and Twitter to create an alert system for attendees. They built a scheduling app for the conference but needed a way to reach people quickly and efficiently during the event. The team used the Twitter Streaming API with the TweetStream ruby gem to listen for tweets from specific users and keywords, and then sent SMS's to interested individuals using the Twilio Ruby gem. They also developed a Sinatra web app to manage a list of SMS subscribers stored in Redis, which responded to incoming messages with TwiML. The system worked well, but required some tweaks to screen out retweets.