David Carrington

Web geek that likes phones
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UK SMS to Jaiku gateway

Published by David Carrington on November 24, 2007 12:37 pm under Mobile

Some facts to get started:

  • Sending an SMS to Jaiku from my phone costs me 25p.
  • Sending an SMS to any UK number from my phone is free.

I had a quick go at asking if people were interested, and it seems I’m not the only one that would benefit from a service which can forward UK messages to Jaiku in Finland – especially if it was free.

Who is this for?

This service is designed for UK residents that want to send messages to Jaiku by SMS on their phone without paying the international fee. I don’t guarantee uptime or service or anything like that, so please don’t rely on it working forever. I’ll let people know of any changes.

Instructions:

  1. Sign in to Jaiku.
  2. Visit the API page to find your personal API key.
  3. Register: Send an SMS to +447786202820 with the message “tojaiku register myusername myapikey”. e.g. “tojaiku register davidcarrington 123abc456def”.
  4. Test: Send an SMS to the same number with your message, prefixed “tojaiku”. For example: “tojaiku This is my first test message via Dave’s UK gateway”.
  5. And that’s it!

Costs:

You will pay your usual SMS cost of sending a text message to a UK number for each message sent. I personally get 3000 free texts on Orange, so I don’t worry about it.

General Notes:

  • This service will never send you any messages, including during registration.
  • The “tojaiku” and “register” commands are not case sensitive.
  • I don’t store your messages or any usage stats.
  • I do store your username and API key in a MySQL database (there’s no other way to make it work).
  • I created a Jaiku channel if anyone wants to join that to receive updates

If you have any questions or comments, please add a comment or contact me via Jaiku if you prefer.

7 Comments so far

  1. Sean on December 23rd, 2007

    awwwwwwwesome! thanks for this using it now :-)

    Sean

  2. Ciarán Rooney on January 13th, 2008

    Hey David

    Great service, one thing I just registered with you and it forwarded my registration message to Jaiku with my API key. Could be a security risk if people don’t delete that Jaiku.

    Anyway thanks for this great service, I like your CAPTCHA too,

    Ciarán

  3. David Carrington on July 17th, 2008

    The service won’t forward your registration message unless you sent it twice.

  4. Deb W on August 15th, 2008

    I tried to get this working a few months ago; it didn’t work immediately and Twitter returned from one of its many outages and I set this aside. Now, with the demise of Twitter SMS in the UK, I’m trying again, but still not getting anywhere. Is it still running? Am I doing something stupid? Help…

  5. David Carrington on August 15th, 2008

    I’ve now wiped the list of users, as the API keys were out of date. This means that existing users will have to re-register. I’ve now added in a fix that lets you send the register command as many times as you like and it will update your current API key.

    I can confirm this service is still up and running – just tested it myself :)

  6. Deb W on August 15th, 2008

    Hm, yes, I re-registered yesterday for that reason, with no success. And I’ve tried again in the past hour, again with no success. I did get my API key again, and am following the instructions above :-(

  7. Gráinne Murphy on August 18th, 2008

    Is there any option for Irish users? Twitter’s demise is such a pain!

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    I'm David Carrington, a 25 year old web developer / geeky guy from Maidenhead in the UK
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