How to Build an SMS Service
ISBN: 789742233
EAN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 52
Pages: 52
Using Twitter to Build a SMS Service > Twitter Overview
Twitter (http://twitter.com) is a social networking service that allows users to broadcast their goings-on to one another via SMS (as well as email and instant messenger). Its API is described at: http://twitter.com/help/api and a healthy developer community has grown around its API at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation.
Fundamentally, Twitter is about updating your status you tell Twitter what you're doing, and it tells all your friends.
For example, let's say you and I have registered with Twitter and we've marked each other as friends. If I were to send this SMS to Twitter's short code (40404):
You and all my other friends on Twitter would receive an SMS from 40404 that reads:
Twitter also lets you send direct messages to specific users by prefacing a message with the letter "d" followed by the recipient's user name, or handle. So, if instead of sending a general "tweat" (that's what they call status update messages like the one above), I sent this SMS to Twitter:
my co-author Brian (and only Brian) would receive this message: