22nd April 2006

Cool SMS tricks

posted in disruptive-technology |

I am not a big user of SMS, but have used it a few times in the past few months to good effect. According to WikiPedia:

Short Message Service (SMS) is a service available on most digital mobile phones that permits the sending of short messages (also known as text messages, or more colloquially SMSes, texts or even txts) between mobile phones, other handheld devices and even landline telephones. Other uses of text messaging can be for ordering ringtones, wallpapers and entering competitions.

One thing I did awhile back was create a Yahoo Mail filter which automatically sends any mail from my wife (she doesn’t email me much) directly to my mobile phone as a SMS. When I was attending a conference a few months ago, I was sitting in a session when there was a crisis at home– and my wife sent me an email message, hoping I’d get it since I hadn’t answered my cell phone. At the time I could not take a phone call and wasn’t online, but could read a SMS message, and was able to learn what was happening so I could call back immediately. She did not actually send me a SMS message, but her email was converted to SMS by the Yahoo mail filter. This was really handy, since I would not have found out about what was going on (and it was a crisis) until much later had this SMS functionality not existed and been setup.

Instead of setting up a Yahoo mail filter like I have which sends all mail from a particular sender as a SMS message, you could create a more complex rule, also requiring some word in the subject line from particular senders. So you could tell members of your family or work team that in a crisis, if you are not answering your email, they can include a particular “code word” as an email subject and you’ll receive it as a SMS message.

This weekend I used SMS to send messages to family members and friends during a performance of “Dear Edwina” at our Lubbock Arts Festival. Again, I was not able to talk on the phone because I was in a show audience, but was able to use SMS. I also used SMS a few weeks ago to quickly get word to our family of a successful surgery that one of my kids had. I am not very adept at using the phone keypad to type messages yet, but although it seems cumbersome, I am learning that SMS communication can be very powerful and convenient.

The last trick with SMS I just learned about this weekend from a Yahoo wwwedu post by Andy Carvin regards sending email as a SMS message to anyone’s cell phone that supports SMS. Just use Teleflip: Send an email from any email client to:

(yourcellphonenumber)@teleflip.com

Your email text message will be converted to the SMS format supported by the cell phone you are sending it to, and the person should be able to read your message. (Or at least the first part of it, since longer SMS messages are generally truncated.)

Very cool trick to know and tell.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 9:17 pm and is filed under disruptive-technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. 1 On April 24th, 2006, Jim McNelis said:

    Thanks for posting that Wes. You’re right, it is cool stuff. As a heads up, Teleflip does not work with certain cellular services. Some service providers (US Cellular, for instance) block these “outside-the-network” SMS messages. Not sure why.