Sending Images via SMS with Filepicker and Twilio | Hacker News Reader

Sending Images via SMS with Filepicker and Twilio

twilio.com

43 pointsmegmurph8420 comments

I have been searching for MMS API provider, but couldn't find any. I was hoping this news is about Twilio supporting MMS but it is not.

What is difficult about supporting MMS? No one seems to offer it.

Would it be possible for users to send an MMS to an email address instead of a phone number? I don't mean using an email client. I mean type in a@example.com in the field where one would normally type phone numbers. I don't have email on my iPhone and I often use iMessage to email pics to myself.

You might not get 2-way communication easily but it could be a good option regardless.

Send from MMS to email, certainly. It's all just email under the hood.

I use this as an input method on http://montabe.com, for instance.

But going the other way - sending an image via SMS/MMS to a user (which is what that post is about) - is a totally different animal. One in which you'd likely need to format specifically for different carriers and the like (and that's best case).

Yeah, this would be super simple to build using SendGrid (which you could say is the Twilio equivalent for email). For example: http://sendgrid.com/docs/Code_Examples/ruby.html

In fact, here's a pull request for the necessary changes. https://github.com/jpf/filepicker-twilio-example/pull/1/file...

Merged. The Filepicker.io demo in the blog post now supports sending email via SendGrid.

MMS is largely just an SMS with a link to a file. It's pretty easy to send a link to a file hosted somewhere.

Is it possible to use Twilio SMS API to receive MMS message? Am I be able to receive SMS in backend and decode the data to get the link to the image?

I can't speak to the Twilio API, but you certainly can with the Mogreet SMS/MMS api. When an MO (Mobile originated) message is received from your user, we decode and store any media included (like images!) and then we make a web services callback to your app with the message content, the info about the user that sent it in, and a url to the media payload of that MO message. Anthor

Anthony here, Mogreet CTO. MMS is not at all like SMS under the hood. While links are theoretically supported, in practical real life the content (images, video, audio, etc) is encoded into the MM7 body, and delivered all together to the handset. Check out our docs online for much more about what you can do: https://developer.mogreet.com/docs

anthor

Ah, I'd assumed putting in the body wasn't practical and that everything would be using links.

This might be more than you asked for but here goes:

Cellular networks still have to interop with SS7. On most major large Cellular networks this is accomplished with a protocol called IMS. Integrated Multimedia Subsystem provides wrappers for non-IP transactions to allow IP controls over analog equipment. Put simply: stuff that isn't IP gets broken up and wrapped in IP before it can go on the network.

Because of this, and other factors, making a picture messaging system that operates over this structure is difficult. So difficult that virtually all of the MMSC (MMS Gateways) are proprietary and prohibitively expensive.

Why doesn't anyone support MMS? Because it costs too much.

Actually Mogreet offers it - for only $0.01 per send. https://developer.mogreet.com - they do MMS campaigns for the studios, media outlets, retailers etc and just opened their API last year. This is NOT SMS with a link but rather full blown MMS - audio, pictures, slideshows, video etc.

It makes sense to pass files by reference rather than by value. This integration example would allow you to send files as urls via the SMS protocol instead of sending blobs of data.

Mobile network bandwidth is certainly a constraint in the US (cellular networks throttling high data usage subs is a proof of that). Viewed in that context pass by reference makes greater sense.

I got excited thinking that Twilio finally supported sending images... but all this article describes is sending a link to an image via SMS.

Google Voice barely supports MMS messages properly; I think it'll be a while before Twilio supports it (although I could be mistaken). If you're a Twilio folk on here, care to share roadmap?

Author of the blog post here. We get a lot of requests for MMS and it's something that we're looking into. In the meantime, I wanted to let people know about how Filepicker could be used with Twilio SMS, which I think is a cool use case.

You get even partially-functional MMS out of Google Voice? Is there a setting somewhere? I'm lucky to even get a blank message, normally I get nothing at all if someone sends an MMS to my GV number (iPhone, but same result on web)

While I haven't done it personally, it is theoretically possible to use AT&T's new Call Management API (powered by Tropo) along with their MMS API to send MMS messages. I suggest you check out https://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId... for more info

You can send true MMS, means picture/video with in message body using txtimpact mms gateway, check out their developers api, http://www.txtimpact.com/mms-messaging.asp. simple to implement..

--Hugo

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