Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Twitter does provide support for SMS; and that is how it got started... today it has evolved into the web with all kinds of clients pulling from Twitter, but SMS is still supported. Am I missing something?

ceo
 

Kind of. Messages between Twitter users have always been pure and (very) simple database queries, and SMS has always been at the periphery, not the actual message "broker" if you like. That Twitter uses SMS for message exchange between users (if talking PC and mobile application access) is just an analogy.

You know what an SMSC does, so I don't have to explain that, and there's no SMSC at the core of Twitter, just some Ruby and database queries.
 

Actually it might not be based on Ruby anymore. I found this from 2008: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on-rails/

This was also interesting (implying Scala): http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2009/04/twitter-blaming-ruby-for-their-mistakes.html
It was their decision to use Ruby, which was quite "bleeding edge" at the time (and still is), so it was their own fault. For such a simple service as Twitter there were very good stable alternatives, be it PHP, ASP or Java. It would still have taken very short time to develop.
 

Also, to complete the picture, integrating SMS input (or MO SMS) in a Web service is a basic and low cost service provided by carriers and aggregating brokers alike, so clearly Twitter didn't handle SMS, they just used such services to get SMS input to Twitter. Normally those services transfers the received SMS as a simple HTTP request, so there's no dealing with the SMS per se. The same goes with MMS reception (or sending).

Again, you know this already.

In Twitizer (http://twitizer.com) I use e-mail instead, so I don't have to deal with contacting SMS brokers in many countries. Even so, either e-mail or MMS can be used for sending Twitter updates via Twitizer. I could easily support SMS too, but that would be more expensive for users (compared to e-mail at least) and considerably more cumbersome for me.