
Productizing Twilio Applications - joshuacc
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/19/productizing-twilio-applications/
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pardner
That's a superb article re: real-world Twilio. We did a head to-head with
twilio and tropo and twilio won hands down in terms of actual "production-
worthiness" despite tropo having "more" features including speech reco.
[http://pardner.com/2011/04/tropo-not-ready-for-prime-time-
we...](http://pardner.com/2011/04/tropo-not-ready-for-prime-time-went-with-
twilio/)

~~~
maratd
> We did a head to-head with twilio and tropo and twilio won hands down in
> terms of actual "production-worthiness" despite tropo having "more" features
> including speech reco.

Had the same head-to-head, and Tropo won for us. Tropo has substandard docs
and higher prices, but the tech and API is top notch. We also needed the
international coverage. Regardless, they are both great products and great
companies. You can't go wrong with either, unless you have very particular
needs.

~~~
pardner
Don't disagree. Tropo does some extremely cool stuff... having a single app
handle IM, SMS, tweets, voice is kinda magical. Seems to have better local
number availability as well. The lack of any rate limiting handshaking for
handling sms blasts was a deal killer for my app however... imo if you try to
push sms faster that they can send it they should either queue the messages
(as twilio does) or provide handshaking that says "can't send that message"
instead of silently discarding the message.

That said, our app uses a mashup of both tropo and twilio now, we use tropo to
handle "tweet" dialog with consumers.

~~~
maratd
> imo if you try to push sms faster that they can send it they should either
> queue the messages (as twilio does)

Absolutely! I simply don't understand that decision. I mean, I can create my
own internal queue to get around the problem, but that burden shouldn't be on
me.

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graphene

       Additionally, Twilio is the nascent, embryonic form of the first Internet that a
       billion people are going to have access to, because Twilio turns every phone
       into a smartphone.
    

So the total potential market for Twillio apps is the amount of mobile phones
in circulation which are not smartphones. Will this number not be shrinking in
a few years, even if the predominance of non-smartphones in developing
countries is causing it to increase on the short term?

~~~
tptacek
For _arbitrary_ businesses reaching out to mass-market clients, it'll be a
decade at least before "customer is extremely likely to be carrying true
smartphone" will translate to "exploitable assumption". Local businesses do
not as a rule write cross-platform phone apps. If you want to be the company
that e.g. gets rid of those stupid flashing pager things that restaurants give
people waiting for tables, it helps you very little to know that 1/3rd of
restaurant customers will be holding an iPhone.

On the other hand, that application is more or less "hello world" with Twilio,
and presents a fine customer experience even to people with iPhones.

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statictype
I've been looking at Twilio on and off for more than an year and would really
like to make use of it and do something interesting. But they're still mostly
US-centric that makes it kinda difficult for anyone not targeting a US market
to use efficiently (I don't blame them - I'm sure the paperwork itself to run
something like this in each country must be a nightmare)

~~~
johns
We just added full support for SMS in Canada[0], have local voice-enabled
numbers in the UK, many more European countries on the way[1] and
international SMS in beta[2]. If we're not where you need us, most likely
we're working hard to be there as soon as it's possible.

If you have a phone number you want to use to make calls from in a country we
don't offer local numbers, you can verify it to use as a caller ID then call
to any of our supported countries[3].

[0] <http://www.twilio.com/CA/pricing> [1] <http://www.twilio.com/eu-beta-
signup> [2] <http://www.twilio.com/faq/international> [3]
<http://www.twilio.com/pricing/international-calling-rates>

~~~
statictype
Thanks. For what it's worth, I'm in India - I know the bureaucracy around here
will make it tedious - but on the other hand, _everyone_ has a mobile phone
and sms is very popular (and cheap) - the market for phone-based apps is
potentially very huge.

~~~
dmor
We haven't announced any formal plans for expansion to Asia, but we are
committed to serving developers worldwide. We'll make sure to let everyone
know when we have plans we can share.

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calufa
I would like to do something with Twillio, unfortunatelly I cant find a
idea...

~~~
rokhayakebe
Write an app that reminds people to take their medicine x times daily.

~~~
adityakothadiya
Shameless self plug here: my iPhone app JustRemindIt just does that -
<http://justremindit.com>. Give it a try! It's based on Twilio only.

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jhancock
Good write up. I had a distantly similar problem last year. Needed a poor
man's transactional email and newsletter blaster. I wanted to leverage my ruby
app code and make calls to a mail delivery engine. Problem is, things fail,
and you don't want to send the same email under the same conditions twice. I
ended up with a brute force failsafe by logging a "signature" of each message
send to a mongodb collection and do a look up as a safety check prior to each
send (or batch). Its not efficient, but works and when my mailer fails, which
it does often, I simply restart it and don't worry about ticking off my user
base. I end up with a rather large mongodb collection, but every few months, I
prune it by removing log items that I know won't happen again.

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gojomo
I ♥ this throwaway line:

 _The end-game for Zynga’s take-over-the-world vision is the human race slaved
to artificial dopamine treadmills._

Continuing that off-topic digression, I highly recommend the recent 'Black
Mirror' episode (from the UK's channel 4), "15 Million Merits":
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_c_Kf8NtOg&feature=resul...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_c_Kf8NtOg&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL1EA093A50CE23E88)

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djb_hackernews
That was like 30 straight minutes full of extremely useful information. Wow.

That voicemail deletion "bug" is awesome.

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patio11
Thanks, that puts a smile on my face.

