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Show HN: My 2-Hour Twilio App

txt2ping.com

57 pointsed24 comments

Twilio has an SMS app contest going on, and the deadline is midnight tonight

http://blog.twilio.com/2010/02/resources-for-getting-started...

-danielle @ Twilio

Very cool, worked as advertised. Two things:

1) It sent me a text letting me know the message had been received, and another with the result. The confirmation was nice, but since the messages came 2 seconds apart you could skip the first one and save 3 cents.

2) Would be nice if it followed 301 redirects.

I agree about not needing the confirmation. I actually got the confirmation 5 seconds after the result.

SMS msgs are not guaranteed to be received in the same order sent.

Good showcase. Are you paying for the SMS out of pocket? FYI Couldn't check https adress.

Yep, but it's cheap so I don't mind.

Just pushed HTTPS support :)

Can you tell us a little more about this? How easy it's to set up?

Where do you get them for cheap?

twilio?

You should add an example url and specify users not include "http:// because http://example.com doesn't work.

Fixed!

I created a similar app, but primarily for India (using India local number). But it should work internationally also if you are willing to pay international SMS charges (don't know at what premium). I've hosted at appengine first to see the response http://sms2ping.appspot.com Do let me know if someone tries it. BTW I get a response message free so am not paying to send out messages as response

Very Cute. How are you keeping this free ? I am not familiar with Twilio pricing models, so your answer will educate me as well.

twilio is pay-as-you-go, so this probably doesn't cost him more than 10 bucks a month.

The problem is Twilio provides no way of billing end users. In this case it comes down to a micropayments problem (which still haven't been solved sufficiently). So you either have to charge up-front for a monthly service fee of a reasonable sum, or stick adverts everywhere which will hopefully cover your costs. It's a major flaw for the platform if you want to build a business off of it (I've been playing around with a per-monthly-fee service concept recently).

pretty fast as well. Good Job!

Pure uberness.

my contest idea was chatroulette for twilio. i wrote some php code but am too lazy to finish it and make a whole nice sheeny website.

youd be broke rather fast (if it took off)

I did that: http://www.happyfunline.com/

Didn't know there was a contest though!

sorry, meant to reply to this thread - contest info is here: http://contests.twilio.com

danielle @twilio

Android please.

It just uses your text messaging app. Should work on any mobile phone.

also I think you can get to a command line in android and run curl yourself

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