Picturing the Future of Messaging: Twilio MMS Now Available on All US Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Picturing the Future of Messaging: Twilio MMS Now Available on All US Numbers

twilio.com

35 pointsjefflinwood10 comments

MMS is the future of messaging? Hopefully not ;)

Personally, I don't think I've ever used them, even before mobile Internet. Is it common in the US?

Is there still a use case for MMS that isn't better served by facebook mesenger, whatsapp, viber, ... ?

You can't use facebook messenger programmatically anymore. Also my parents still don't have smart phones and don't want ones. They use mms pretty heavily.

Perhaps not everyone uses those services?

You can send to any number, with just the phone number.

When developing an application for the general public, none of the services you suggest come close to solving that problem.

>You can send to any number, with just the phone number.

I don't think that works in practice, some / many people can't receive MMS. I don't even know if I can, think it has to be set up on the phone to match the carrier.. or something =/

Maybe it's different in the U.S.?

Why would I install those things when my MMS client is built into my phone, I don't have to find someone's contact info because I already have their phone numbers, etc.?

Because you can send a message to a /person/ (or multiple people) instead of a /phone number/. Depending on said service, said person can interact with the message independent of device or phone number. Useful for people who interact with people who change phone numbers/devices often and/or travel between countries. Just send the message, and you don't have to think.

But people will forever stick to their stock messaging application as much as possible, sticking to slower, more restrictive technologies. MMS is a dinosaur.

And SMS is a dinosaur too (but it's still around and kicking) and it's still the best way to get mobile app installs.

Sorry, but the need to have the same app installed to send and receive an image significantly restricts the audience of a given product (and you're locked into someone else's app).

Current: Step 1 >> Get 100M users to install an app. Step 2 >> Get them to take pictures of stuff. Step 3 >> Get permissions all the people who took picture to upload the pictures or just replace their normal picture-taking behavior with your app. No biggie. With universal MMS (via Twilio): Step 1 >> Get them to take pictures of stuff

To me, having to think about what service person 1 uses compared to person 2, etc... that's way harder than using phone numbers.

And besides, with those services, I am sending messages to usernames, not to people... except for Facebook, in which case I am sending to one of many thousands of John Does who are on Facebook.

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