[sbisker]

Just so you're aware, TXTMob is historically the name of a famous-in-very-small-circles group SMS service from 2004. Released as an activist digital art project and used to organize protests, it's often cited as one of the original influences for Twitter. It's not a name that the average person on the street would recognize - and fortunately TXT won't be confused with Text by search engines - but it's worth being aware of it. (Unless you did it intentionally, in which case, love the shout-out. :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

[rabble]

Yep, i worked on TxtMob, and at Odeo when we came up with Twitter. The idea of twitter came from a hackday project of Jack, Noah Glass, and Florain Webber. But they were all aware of TxtMob as we'd done a presentation and evaluation of TxtMob a few days earlier.

At the time, you could only use twitter via sms. It's since become much less tied to SMS. I'm not even sure if you CAN do the whole signup and user creation via txt message alone anymore.

The problem with txtmob was the group creation process was always clunky. If you could solve that, make it easy to create groups and start participating, then it might still take off. At one point we even had a version of txtmob which let you sign up and sign off via asterisk, using voip. Looks like pretty much what you did. That was after twitter launched, so we never really put a lot of work in to making it stable.

I still think it's a good idea, i say go for it! Hosted VOIP as a service makes it MUCH easier to do this today, than in 2004-2006.

[christefano]

http://support.twitter.com/articles/14589-how-to-add-your-ph...

[marksbren]

Thanks. I have never heard of TXTMob.

[edit] - after reading that I do remember hearing about this while reading about the beginnings of Twitter. Unfortunately when brainstorming domains I did not recall TXTMob.

[bdr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia