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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

"How I taught my dog how to market twilio.com"

SMS is all very interesting but it is not 2013 any more so there is no need to send an SMS (paying people on the way) when you can just send an email. It still pops on the person's phone as a new message (at least in Android world, no idea how those iPhones work). Email also has better delivery, speaking as someone in a poor reception area I cannot reliably receive messages, however, wifi works pretty good at home and I can get emails with that whereas wifi does me no favours for SMS.

A few years ago I did have SMS for my own version of an uptime monitor, however, when my credits ran out I didn't miss the SMS messages at all (my script also emailed). That led to my 'discovery' that being able to send an SMS from a bit of code might be impressive however it is also not that useful in the first world. Maybe this product is better suited to dogs in the developing world somewhere.

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Yeah, i love twilio, but its value is in integrating with legacy services or customers who are stuck on old technologies. Using it to build new services around SMS/MMS that don't need to be built on SMS seems a little backwards.

"so we take this awesome system, it takes pictures that we upload it to dropbox, a perfectly acceptable destination for pictures. and then, for some strange reason, instead of sending an email or just leaving it there in dropbox or doing any of the other great things we can do with pictures, we make an MMS"

Both of you missed something big about SMS/MMS:

It's not really a messaging system, it's a push notification system that everyone who has a smartphone is subscribed to.

You probably have a phone that can accept MMS, and a corresponding phone number.

Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.

Individual systems might be great at specific things (motion detection, security systems, etc.).

Dogs are living beings, they can be trained by average humans to do new things that your typical security system never imagined.

You misunderstood the GP. Instead of using Twilio, you can send an email directly to the phone number, and it works the same as SMS (more or less).

> " I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox."

That is what I thought. But actually, in practice, once one has moved from some old Nokia brick to a modern smartphone, the assumption is wrong. SMS has its place for sending someone a quick text but it is going the way of FAX, to be only used in some arcane circumstances.

With SMS the delivery was not as good as email. As mentioned, there is perfectly good wifi where I live but marginal phone signal. In theory I could find some remote mountain where there is only 2G but even then emails get delivered at least in header form.

The other thing is that when I had my SMS notifications I had to buy credits in advance. If the monitored sites were completely down and notifications were being sent to three people then those credits could run out quickly. So there was that unnecessary dependency on a third party service that had some credits to pay for in order for it to work. Totally non-strategic!

If we think of the dog and the selfies, say the dog just happens to tap the button every few seconds. That could be expensive with SMS but free on email.

You can also build some backup into the email approach, you can cc your private email as well as email your work one. There is none of the 140 character message length nonsense either.

Plus, who doesn't check their phone every 6 minutes or so?

To be slightly unfair, TFA is marketing spam. Even the box is over-engineered, you can get wifi PTZ cameras for small change on eBay and a few of them have an input for a switch so you can take 'selfies' with them, no wheel reinvention needed.

> Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.

You can't have push notifications for certain subjects or email addresses? If you're going to make home security part of this, you might as well set up your email to be accommodating to it as well. If you're gonna use email.

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