2nd
The Sheer Utility of SMS
I spent the last two weeks on a cruise from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It was fantastic, but there was no internet on the boat, which meant we were pretty isolated. Roaming charges in Russia are $4.99/minute, and while there were internet cafes in most of our ports-of-call, I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it would be for me to trust any of them with my email password.
But SMS text messages were only 35 cents (8 roubles!) each… expensive, but acceptable given the circumstances.
There was mobile coverage for nearly every km of our journey (except in the middle of Europe’s two largest lakes), and for fun I used Twitter as a gateway to the outside world. I was even able to help solve a problem at work, at midnight (Moscow time) from the middle of the Volga River.
All of which got me thinking about how useful it would be, when travelling or otherwise out of internet range, to have a keyword-based SMS portal. Something not unlike 466453, but where you could define your own keyword->action mappings:
- mom: Send text as email to my mom (who refuses to enable SMS on her phone)
- fam: Send text as multi-recipient email to my friends and family
- blog: Post text as an entry in this blog
- fup: Add text to a list of items to “follow up” on
- cal: Treat text as a new calendar event
- card: Treat text as a new contact record
- netflix: Treat text as a movie title to be added Netflix queue
- news: Send the next entry from today’s top headlines
- and so on…
It would be difficult to create such a portal for general use, but petty easy to create one for myself.
As it turns out, the SMS Gateway that I’m considering uses a simple email API to enable two-way texting. When your number gets a message, the system forwards it to an email. Reply emails are relayed back to the sender. There’s a nice “two birds with one stone” quality to this approach, as it means that one could use the same application as an email portal, too.
