sms

I've written my fair share of fly-by-night SMS services. Not for clients, of course — when someone needs a mobile campaign we talk to folks who live and breath text messaging. But I've hacked together a few hobby SMS apps on the cheap. There was this one, for example, which used email-to-SMS gateway functionality to provide a rating system for SXSW panels. Before that was LastCall, a genuine (if not shortcoded) SMS app I wrote for DCist that allowed users to check subway times, query OpenTable for available reservations and perform a number of other questionably-useful functions.

The DCist mobile service was a nightmare to put together. I bought a cracked-screen cellphone off Ebay, an unlimited-SMS mobile account and went through a half-dozen USB-to-serial cables before finding one with a Linux-compatible chipset. The software I used to spool messages from the phone to the server was a bit flaky, requiring a ton of configuration. And then WMATA changed their website and something went screwy, sending tons of unwanted text messages to hapless subscribers. The whole effort took months. The moral was clear: rolling your own SMS gateway is a huge pain in the butt.

That's why I used the email-to-SMS approach for the SXSW service. It worked beautifully, but everyone knows it's a little unprofessional — the mobile carriers can always shut you down, and users get confused when asked to send a text message to an email address.