Show HN: Textmob - My simple Twilio + GroupMe app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Textmob - My simple Twilio + GroupMe app

textmob.co

27 pointsmarksbren11 comments

Just so you're aware, TXTMob is historically the name of a famous-in-very-small-circles group SMS service from 2004. Released as an activist digital art project and used to organize protests, it's often cited as one of the original influences for Twitter. It's not a name that the average person on the street would recognize - and fortunately TXT won't be confused with Text by search engines - but it's worth being aware of it. (Unless you did it intentionally, in which case, love the shout-out. :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

Thanks. I have never heard of TXTMob.

[edit] - after reading that I do remember hearing about this while reading about the beginnings of Twitter. Unfortunately when brainstorming domains I did not recall TXTMob.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

Yep, i worked on TxtMob, and at Odeo when we came up with Twitter. The idea of twitter came from a hackday project of Jack, Noah Glass, and Florain Webber. But they were all aware of TxtMob as we'd done a presentation and evaluation of TxtMob a few days earlier.

At the time, you could only use twitter via sms. It's since become much less tied to SMS. I'm not even sure if you CAN do the whole signup and user creation via txt message alone anymore.

The problem with txtmob was the group creation process was always clunky. If you could solve that, make it easy to create groups and start participating, then it might still take off. At one point we even had a version of txtmob which let you sign up and sign off via asterisk, using voip. Looks like pretty much what you did. That was after twitter launched, so we never really put a lot of work in to making it stable.

I still think it's a good idea, i say go for it! Hosted VOIP as a service makes it MUCH easier to do this today, than in 2004-2006.

http://support.twitter.com/articles/14589-how-to-add-your-ph...

Wow - I like this a lot. A very simple idea that's actually useful! How long did this take to create? Aside from Twilio and GroupMe what are you using to power it behind the scenes?

One note - if you're going to have people turn over their phone numbers to you - its probably best to include a privacy policy of some sort that explains how they will (or won't) be used.

Thanks. Yeah, I created this over the course of a few hours. It is hosted on Google App Engine and uses Twilio to setup the Groupme numbers (by sending an SMS)

To clarify, I am not going to use the phone numbers in any way. I do send them over to Groupme (to add to the group) so I cannot speak for them. This is more of a pet project currently and am not going to be spamming the phones or anything. I just wanted to see if people like it.

I agree. I should throw up a privacy policy. Any easy policies to throw up?

[Edit] - I posted an explanation as a placeholder Privacy Policy. No legal language, but it at least clarifies things.

Can someone explain to me how this is different from using GroupMe as-is?

When using Groupme, usually the owner of the group has to enter the phone numbers of all the group members. I made Textmob so that you could share a link and those who wanted to join could add themselves.

Thanks!

i like that its sms based, its sorta like Beluga (facebook aquired them today)

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