Google App Engine – SMS and Voice Integration With Twilio | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine – SMS and Voice Integration With Twilio

developers.google.com

80 pointsshakes26 comments

That's great, but telecom is still agaist GAE ToS:

"4.3 Restrictions. Customer will not, and will not allow third parties under its control to: (f) use the Service to operate or enable any telecommunications service or in connection with any Application that allows End Users to place calls to or to receive calls from any public switched telephone network;"

Source: https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms

A question was asked about this a few months back and a GAE PM basically said use it at your own risk. Here's the thread: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/c8u71g5Cc...

Hopefully, this is a signal that they want to sort this out...

To be frank, Twilio's service doesn't constitute a regulated telephony service, which is why Google allows them on the platform.

If Twilio integration would expose them to Telco regulation, you better believe it would never happen.

I agree the wording above is poor and could use a rewrite, but I wanted to articulate what Google is afraid of: being classified as subject to CALEA.

Right. My guess is that with services like Twilio, CALEA provisions are fulfilled via the carriers themselves. Any thoughts on that?

They're fulfilled by what we in the biz call "upstream providers". Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Level3.

What distinguishes a telecom company from an Internet company is surprisingly vague. Many in the industry say it's the process of selling Two-Way SIP connectivity that gets you, others say its colo'ing gear inside of a ILEC.

As in all things telecom, consult your lawyer.

Google Groups website is broken, so that thread is not readable.

Seems to work fine for me... but here's the response:

"Re: [google-appengine] Re: TOS question - may I add a dial button

Hello All,

Please take my comment as a comment and not legal guidance as any legal guidance needs to come from your own legal counsel based on our terms of service. But, that clause is in our ToS as App Engine is not built to be or regulated as a telecommunication service and as such anyone who would fall under telecommunication regulations would likely not pass an audit. I know that sounded cryptic but I'm trying to be as precise as possible without telling you what to do :)

I hope that helps and I hope you'll understand if you want more clarification it might be hard to give,

Greg D'Alesandre Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine"

Did we miss the sunsetting announcement for that Google service? /s

The Twilio api is so simple that this "integration" does not bring much except exposure for Twilio and $20 of Twilio credit for appengine users. We have been using Twilio to send SMS from our appengine app for months now without any issue. In any case a good news.

Killer Zabar - what have you been using it for?

The app is both on the web and on mobile (iOS and Android app). When you use it on the web, we advertise the mobile version, with the option for the user to give his phone number to receive an SMS on his phone with the install link. It serves as a reminder and ease the experience of finding us on the app store with a way better conversion rate than an email.

Slick - love that use case. Totally one we didn't expect, by the way, but has ended up being super effective.

Super easy to implement and test on GAE too with the Tasks API. The testbed makes an async implementation with full coverage half an hour of work. Big fan of the supplementary services Google provides here.

I'm disappointed by this poor integration. I had hoped Google would at least make importing libraries somewhat easier by including them as official third party libraries.

http://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/lib...

This is just marketing. For some actual added value, Google could've made the whole process of acquiring tokens and billing transparent. Click a button in the App Engine dashboard, and it gets new tokens from Twilio which are billed through Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Twilio

This is more than just marketing, but less than what you're describing. A great deal of work went into updating and testing our helper libraries in the GAE environment, as well as building documentation and proof on concepts[1] for developers to learn from.

Deeper forms of integration require heavier lifting and require buy-in across the organization. If partnerships like this are successful and improve the adoption and use of new tooling, I think it will be much easier to make a case for more integration down the line.

[1]: http://twiliosandbox.appspot.com/

Agreed, although the community has started offering some fairly good solutions for integrating third party libraries into App Engine projects. This layout is pretty good, for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4863557/how-do-i-manage-t...

For (I think) a year now I've had a toy application I wrote one Saturday that uses GAE with Twilio. It is just a joke line where Twilio reads off a joke to the caller and let's them vote up/down on it. Twilio is so easy that it was only about 2 hours work one rainy Saturday to get it up and running. It has worked without errors ever since and is still using the initial deposit I gave Twilio.

Nice! What's the number? Love comedy lines.

Don't know about other countries, but it's quite costlier compared to GupShup, which operates a similar service in India.

Important feedback - thanks for sharing.

Good for the Twil' homies. Congrats guys. More distro is good distro.

Thanks Josh!

Congrats!! Would be great to know how this was made possible. Did Google approach Twilio, or did Twilio approach Google, or is there a third party services partner program that any developer can follow

Deleted comment

Sort of meta, but pretty much every article related to a google service will get a comment like this. It seems HN goes through these cycles where something gets a lot of attention and then every article even tangentially related gets at lease one boiler plate comment like this. It happened a lot a while back when "questions as headlines" was the hot topic to jump on. There'd always be that one person that'd be there to post the wikipedia link to the article about it. I see it when there's articles about animal intelligence. You'll get someone who posts that Hitchhiker's quote about dolphins. It's boring and a lot of times, those comments end up at the top of the thread.

Now to address your comment about Django. It supports Django, just fine[0]. The problem hasn't been with supporting Django, but supporting the Django ORM and that's merely because of the GAE data store. And that wasn't ever limited to GAE, you couldn't use it with any non relational data store. That problem seems to have been mitigated by the existence of django-nonrel[1], however.

[0] https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/django [1] https://github.com/django-nonrel

While we are on meta-topic, allowing comments to be deleted after there are replies is a fairly user hostile.

I suppose it's someone protecting his precious karma?

The deprecation policy says they must give you a year's notice (or April 2015, whichever is longer) before deprecating any part of App Engine that isn't experimental: http://googleappengine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/app-engine-and...

Django is supported. If you want to use the Datastore, you need to use django-nonrel: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/django-nonr...

Alternatively, you could use the 'real' Django against Google Cloud SQL.

2. https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/django-nonr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com