January 4th, 2009, 4 Comments »
I stumbled upon this wikiHow article discussing how to send SMS messages from the Internet to phones and mobile devices. After successfully testing out the email method to my iPhone on Fido’s network, I figured I’d distill the bits specific to Canadian networks.
Send SMS Messages Using Email
If you know which cellular carrier the recipient is on, then you can just send an email to their number at a specific email address:
Bell Mobility & Solo Mobile - number@txt.bell.ca
Fido - number@fido.ca
Koodo Mobile - number@msg.koodomobile.com
MTS - number@text.mtsmobility.com
President’s Choice - number@txt.bell.ca
Rogers - number@pcs.rogers.com
Sasktel - number@sms.sasktel.com
Telus Mobility - number@msg.telus.com
Virgin Mobile - number@vmobile.ca
Send SMS Messages Using a Website
You can also send a message to a mobile recipient using the carrier’s website. I’ve linked to the specific pages on Canadian carriers’ sites (the ones I could find) below:
Bell Mobility
Solo Mobile
Fido
Koodo Mobile
MTS
Rogers
Sasktel
Telus Mobility
As it turns out, there’s an exhaustive list in Wikipedia as well. Other web-based options include Facebook apps (here’s one, though I’ve never tried it, so proceed at your own risk) or a service like Send2World.
Most of these solutions require that you know which network the message recipient is on. Here’s a naive question–does anybody know an easy way to answer that question on the fly?
4 Comments »
March 19th, 2007, 6 Comments »
The tech world is all excited about Twitter. I’ve managed to avoid the rage thus far, and am not very interested in hopping on board this particular train. I like what Kathy Sierra has to say about Twitter, and how we’ve possibly crossed a kind of attention event horizon.
Chris Pirillo solicited and recorded some reader feedback (MP3), which includes a mini-rant from me (just after the halfway mark, more or less) about the pridefulness of blogging, and the sheer hubris of Twitter.
Listening to it again, I sound like a Twitter hater, when really I’m currently Twitter ambiguous:
Twitter, it seems to me, is hubris of the highest order. Why would I think that anybody, even my friends and family, would want to read an unedited stream of the pitiful minutiae of my life? Isn’t that self-indulgence on a grand scale?
Beth has also gathered a bunch of opinions on Twitter, and its potential applications for non-profits.
Twitter is a Performance Medium
Today Tara Hunt drew some erudite connections between Twitter, Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare:
Many stories have been lost over the centuries because of assumptions, narrow ideals of what ‘genius’ is, and the very fact that ‘genius’, a relative term defined by a few, is the yard stick for recorded history.
She makes the case that a history of person’s Twitters is an important historical record. Kathy replies in the comments of Tara’s post, and Tara replies to that. They’re way more articulate than me, so go over there and read their debate. Regardless of whether or not we’ll ever have the technology to meaningfully sort through a lifetime of Twitter history, I do wonder whether we’ll have the brain capacity or interest to mull over the content.
The other aspect of Twitter that I haven’t seen discussed is that (like blogs) it’s not a diary, it’s a performance medium. We’re not recording our thoughts and feelings. We’re broadcasting the thoughts and feelings for others to hear. That’s a profound difference, and certainly changes the context for a schwack of historical Twitter data.
Shakespeare on Twitter
Tara’s post got me thinking about how that old dog Bill Shakespeare might have used Twitter:
4:47pm
Drinking Mead. Sweet, sweet mead.
5:03pm
Cavorting with maiden.
5:16pm
Methinks she doth protest too much.
5:34pm
Bollocks. Struck out with maiden.
6:01pm
Sketching out ending to R & J. Totally lifted ending from that cheeky Brooke.
6:03pm
Screw the sodding play. Checking out mop boy.
7:10pm
Making the beast with two back with the mop boy.
7:12pm
Done. Feeling guilty about Anne back in Stratford.
In truth, that’s one guy’s Twitter history that I’d really like to read.
6 Comments »
