When I first started blogging around 2004, pingbacks were very popular.
I remember setting up my blog so I could take a photo on my Motorola Razr, email it to a special address and it would get added to Flickr and then auto posted to my blogger blog.
I went to Glastonbury music festival, which got flooded and took some amusing photos. When I got home I discovered via messages added via pingbacks, that lots of people had found my blog post (I guess via Google search) and linked to it from their blog.
Even now I’m quite amazed at what was possible without Twitter and hashtags, all done using open protocols, and all on our own websites.
Update - thinking about it some more, I don’t think I had the ability to send emails from my phone back then. It’s hard to imagine that because these days it’s just totally the norm. I know that I did have the ability to send MMS messages which could include images, so I must have been using that in some way. In any case, I was able to take a picture while out and about, have it added to Flickr, have it posted in a blog post, and get pingbacks added to comments when people linked to my post, that was nearly 20 years ago!
I seem to remember that some providers had some sort of SMS/MMS<->Email setup such that you could email a [phone number]@[provider.com] address and the recipient would get an SMS and be able to reply. Maybe something like that?
It might have been something like that. I remember there being a phone number@something, but I’m not sure if the something was flickr, blogger or something the phone company provided, or perhaps I found some 3rd party mms to rss gateway. Can’t remember exactly, only that I had it working.
