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Comment by DWakefield | Hacker News Reader

Sending stock quotes, scores, weather, etc. reminds me of a service that Google used to offer via text message. I used that a ton before I got my first smartphone: text W[ZIP code] to 46645 (GOOGL) and it would text back the weather. Same for stock:[symbol] and many other things I've since forgotten. Of course Google killed it, but it was neat while it lasted!

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In my days of messing around with PHP, I wrote a Twitter bot called "SongBuddy" for the purpose of looking up a song via SMS based on some lyrics.

You would send it a DM via SMS (which Twitter supported at the time) containing a few lyrics, and it would do a Google search of "<your input> lyrics", parse the search results, and in theory return the artist and title to you via SMS.

It never worked very well, but I was proud of it!

Yet the currency conversion site I use which is run by one prof, probably on a Pentium III computer stashed under a stairwell at their university, has been up and running for decades and will probably last a lifetime.

What website is that?

fx.sauder.ubc.ca

I made a backend with Twilio and an AWS instance to give me a SMS<->ChatGPT interface.

That allows me to ask ChatGPT questions from anywhere on Earth via a handheld satellite communicator (inReach Mini 2). It's kind of nice to be able to ask ChatGPT things from the middle of death valley.

I used that all the time from my flip phone. It took forever to type out a google search and results could take a minute or two to arrive but it was better than nothing.

Primarily I used it to google the address of a place I wanted to go so I could enter that in my TomTom. Times have changed.

I'm curious when that was. I came up with this idea around 1995 while working for a telecoms research company (a subsidiary of Ericsson). Flight status updates was my canonical example.

Nobody imagined that P2P messaging (requiring multiple presses of a numeric keypad to type one character) would become as popular as it did, so an information service was the best use I could imagine, especially given the growing availability of data through the nascent Web. (Teletext was also still a thing, and we had a separate project for scraping that...)

But guess what those of us with access to SMS (and the general public) ended up using it for?

I had an alphanumeric pager like this in the 1990s. It had a few dozen text channels that were constantly updated with topics like news and sport.

That is a blast from the past! This was around the time of slide-out keyboards, right? I remember using this now too.

I still miss those keyboards

Same. Evo Shift. I miss the days when I wasn't frustrated every time I type.

Apparently this is what my gen will rocker rant about.

HTC Touch Pro 2 and I could type better on that than any phone since. Even managed to get it running Android (it was a Windows Mobile phone which is... old)

Gladly! I’d go so far as to even say I was articulate.

we will look back on whatsapp bots and ai chatbots in 10yr like we look back on those sms services now.

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