Amazon Simple Notification Service Now Supports SMS | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Simple Notification Service Now Supports SMS

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44 pointsjeffbarr8 comments

It seems pretty easy (and cheap), but it seems like it has a lot of limitations that would bug me trying to use it in a real-world situation.

For example, you'd need to have a short display name to conserve characters on SMS, but email subscribers would see that short name as well. Also, having the SMS messages automatically prefixed is kind of annoying (but I understand why they do it).

Also, email subscribers get both the subject and body of the message, while SMS subscribers get just the subject. So that means you'll probably need to put a short URL at the end of the subject line, which of course would also show up in the email subject line and look ugly.

I think this is pretty awesome for internal things like notifying sysadmins or texting you every time you get a sale, but I don't know if I would use it for anything customer-facing.

It is only in the US, 5% of the mobile world market. With the Nexmo Amazon SNS lib you can reach the rest of the world without much change of your code. of course with a direct to carrier model that reduce cost and improve deliverability. Here is more info to get started: http://nexmo.zendesk.com/entries/20636661-get-international-...

How much of a threat is this to Twillio? I suppose Twillio is more for building whole systems, this is just for notifications but it'll be interesting to see how/if they react to this.

This does not seem like that much of threat to Twillio. It not only provides SMS but a wide variety of services. Also, there are a lot of developers already using Twillio, so it does not make sense for them to move to another service.

"You can now subscribe a US phone number to an SNS topic. After the subscription has been confirmed, notifications sent to the topic will be delivered to the phone as an SMS message."

Note the _US_ in there. I stopped reading at that point and couldn't care less. Hi Twilio :)

Funnily enough, until very recently this was my response to Twilio :). Actually, now I look at it, it's still my response to Twilio re: text messages.

Of course I still need to figure out something to do with Twilio.

Twilio doesn't seem to support SMS outside the US, at least it doesn't in the UK.

Well, they're not doing voice so Twilio still has that advantage. Also, support is likely to be much better with a startup than with the huge behemoth.

However, Amazon has the footprint to get you worldwide delivery. Twilio just arrived in (parts of) the EU, but that's a temporary advantage. Also, there's that 0.75c charge. That's already a 0.25% saving and Amazon have a habit of reducing the price whenever possible.

Twilio et al will likely focus on better service, more features, easier signup and use.

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