

Amazon Simple Notification Service Now Supports SMS - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/11/amazon-simple-notification-service-now-supports-sms.html

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jarin
It seems pretty easy (and cheap), but it seems like it has a lot of
limitations that would bug me trying to use it in a real-world situation.

For example, you'd need to have a short display name to conserve characters on
SMS, but email subscribers would see that short name as well. Also, having the
SMS messages automatically prefixed is kind of annoying (but I understand why
they do it).

Also, email subscribers get both the subject and body of the message, while
SMS subscribers get just the subject. So that means you'll probably need to
put a short URL at the end of the subject line, which of course would also
show up in the email subject line and look ugly.

I think this is pretty awesome for internal things like notifying sysadmins or
texting you every time you get a sale, but I don't know if I would use it for
anything customer-facing.

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teljamou
It is only in the US, 5% of the mobile world market. With the Nexmo Amazon SNS
lib you can reach the rest of the world without much change of your code. of
course with a direct to carrier model that reduce cost and improve
deliverability. Here is more info to get started:
[http://nexmo.zendesk.com/entries/20636661-get-
international-...](http://nexmo.zendesk.com/entries/20636661-get-
international-sms-reach-with-amazon-sns-now)

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brackin
How much of a threat is this to Twillio? I suppose Twillio is more for
building whole systems, this is just for notifications but it'll be
interesting to see how/if they react to this.

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darklajid
"You can now subscribe a US phone number to an SNS topic. After the
subscription has been confirmed, notifications sent to the topic will be
delivered to the phone as an SMS message."

Note the _US_ in there. I stopped reading at that point and couldn't care
less. Hi Twilio :)

~~~
coob
Twilio doesn't seem to support SMS outside the US, at least it doesn't in the
UK.

