There's an interesting post on O'Reilly Radar regarding Mozes,a new SMS service.

Gavin and I have been playing alot with our cell phones. I'm a big java guy, so the idea ofdropping on an application to interface with some of our web applications is appealing. Once youget into all of it though, you uncover a world of mess. The cellphone space is a complete cluster-f of horribly supported,unstandardized APIs geared at allowing people to write yet anotherPacMan clone. On top of it, Verizon doesn't even use Java. They useBREW, which is basically an awful way of keeping people from easilydeveloping applications for their halfassed phones.

What I'm getting at is, SMS is really the only viable option for acell phone product right now. The location aware technologies thatare needed to do anything really neat are just too far away. Notjust that, they seem to cause so many ridiculous privacy concernsit's almost not even worth dreaming about. Hopefully the cell phonemanufacturers and the cell services in this country will get theiracts together at some point though, because thats "the next bigthing."

Anyway...

Mozes is a great idea. It'spainfully simple, and frustrates us to know how close we came towriting something similar in our prototyping. We built a reallycool SMS framework a few weekends ago to see if SMS could be aviable alternative to some of the things we're looking to build.The short of it is, yes, yes it is.

There's something to be said for developing for the least commondenominator ;)