David Carrington

I have a phone

Yes, amazing isn’t it. But even better – the internet has phones too. More and more sites are making their services available in the small format with ever increasing interactivity. Only last month I realised that the text message event reminders pushed out by Google Calendar are free! So with the power of my wonderful Pocket PC phone and spare time in my lunch hour, I bring you the Mobile Web: how it affects this site and me.

On Saturday, I received a photo of a dog

Ziggy (shown right), was sent to me by an online friend via MMS. In fact it was my very first photo message received on my new phone. Having never sent one either, I instantly dug into what the MMS was, how it was sent to 6 different people, and what made it tick.

A photo message is basically an e-mail pushed via GPRS or similar network to a mobile phone. It’s got the same rules as an e-mail too: you can cc and bcc, attach multiple files, and write lots of text. This triggered me to a) find out how much it costs to send a photo – about 25p, and b) test it out by sending a photo from the Scout hut.

Already, with the combination of a photo message and Flickr, I opened up a pretty nice set of possibilities. Since Flickr can interact with blogs via XMLRPC, I can send a photo straight onto the front page of my site with it.

Let’s Party!

But hold it right there. How about if I only want to send text to my site and not a photo? I can’t really ask Flickr to just store some text for me about a non-existant image for use on my website. Are there any other tools I can use? Well of course there are.

The first one I came across was LetMeParty – a groovily named website offering a free service of pushing SMS messages straight to your blog. This site has two pretty major limitations for me:

1. It’s a US phone number, so it costs me to send a text message rather than being included in my free bundle.
2. It doesn’t support multi-part texts, so I’d be limited to 160 characters.

Obviously not the right tool for me, but it was cool to give it a go and see what kind of services were out there.

E-mailing to your blog

I had a feeling that Blogger would support all kinds of fancy technology, so I searched Google and came up with the Blogger Mobile page.

“Snap a photo and write some text, send it to blogger, and we’ll do the rest”

Well, that’s ideal except it doesn’t explain anywhere on the page how to get a Claim token, and the more information link points to a broken page. Great!

Falling in the same footsteps, my quick attempts at hunting for a current version of the WP-Mail WordPress plugin led me to the same results – more broken links! I’m not actually all that interested in this right now, so I skipped ahead to somewhere else.

Moblogging – Send SMS to Blog

Hey, that sound’s ideal! The Send SMS to Blog page on the iX Conference Wiki explains the step-by-step process of signing up to Blogger and a IntelliSoftware (a UK-based SMS gateway), linking them together by e-mail, and automagically making anything you SMS to their magic number appears straight into Blogger.

This sounds a lot more like what I want, it’s basically a UK number to do the same thing as LetMeParty. But then I noticed something I wasn’t keen on: “the subject line of the post will be the phone number of the sender”. Hmm, we’ll come back to these guys later I think.

Twitter! Oh my!

I had signed up for Twitter some time last week for the single purpose of finding out if I could send an SMS from my phone straight into Twitter’s list of things I’m doing. Oddly enough – I didn’t find it, even though I saw the part about it being able to send text messages back to me (at a cost) to notify me of any changes on other people’s accounts.

Second time lucky – I spotted the setting with no trouble at all, telling me to “Send updates to: +447624801423″. A few seconds later and I’d sent my first message from my phone to Twitter.

I like this a lot, but it triggered me to ask Nick what he thought about it all, how he’d use it:

Nick: I would like the idea as I could SMS myself drafts/hints while on the go
Me: you just gave me an idea
Nick: ?
Me: SMS -> Website -> Google Calendar API -> quick-create calendar events
Nick: oh my!

Two way SMS with Google Calendar

But… someone had already beaten me to it – with Twittercal. I’ve pounced on this and already I’ve integrated Twitter with WordPress using Alex King’s Twitter Tools – letting me show Twitter straight onto my site.

Being a UK resident, the US-only GEVENT/Google Calendar SMS service isn’t available to me. Luckily, I do get the text messages sent back to my phone to notify me of events in my calendar. Now armed with Twitter and Twittercal though, all I have to do is something like this: “d gcal Take old monitor to the dump on Saturday” and it’s there on my calendar – great stuff.

Phone integration for the future

With Google buying Jaiku, I had a quick peek at their services and signed up to get in the next wave of user accounts. I’m also trying the sneaky back-way in: I’ve emailed a random existing user to see if he’ll invite me onto the site and create me an account. That way I can write a mini review before the mass of Google-triggered accounts get dished out.

But what else have we got in store? I mentioned the guys at IntelliSoftware earlier but I left out something very, very cool from their list of features: they let you send an SMS to them, and instantly convert it to an HTTP POST request to the URL of your choice. This opens up an enormous number of possibilities, basically letting you do anything you like with your webserver after it receives a text message.

Here’s a few ideas that Nick and I came up with:

• Use custom keywords in your text messages to trigger anything you like.
• Have your site add events to Google Calendar with their API’s.
• Write a short blog entry (draft or published) straight onto your website.
• Trigger your home PC to download a file for you.

The list could go on and on. Basically, anything a webserver has control over, you could trigger by an SMS – pretty much endless.

Thanks

I’d like to say a special thanks to Ziggy for helping me discover the world of SMS and how it can be used interactively with he web. Woof!