Trevin Chow

Many carriers support sending SMS by email to their customers, but not all carriers do this and the domains are different for each carrier.  For example, to send an SMS by email to Cingular customers, you’d use <phone_number>@cingularme.com.

Enter: TeleFlip.  The TeleFlip service is intended to get your email on any cell phone via SMS, which is fairly clever, but useless for me since I have a smartphone serviced by Exchange.  A feature of TeleFlip is the ability to send SMS via email for free to any cellphone, regardless of carrier, by using the TeleFlip service by emailing to <phone_number>@teleflip.com.   

I just tested it, works like a charm!  The only indication you used the TeleFlip service is the tag line at the end of your SMS message that says  “Email on your cell — teleflip.com” to advertise their service.

Twitter launched over a year ago and has over 50,000 subscribers. I’ve signed up, tried it and discarded it along with dozens of other “web 2.0″ ideas that have sprung up in the last few years. To me, it didn’t provide any value that I didn’t already derive from IM, email, SMS and Dodgeball. I don’t have many connections on Dodgeball, but continue to check in on a semi-frquent basis because it has proved useful to know where hot spots for the night are.

Twitter on the other hand, is not only used for communicating your location, but all aspects of your life. People are broadcasting messages about their lunch, their mood and maybe even what they’re wearing today. If you’re like me, you’d find this annoying pretty fast. With Dodgeball, sometimes the flood of messages are too much those times I decide to stay in. I can’t even imagine adding an influx of updates from people telling me they’re eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

For some reason, Twitter just won’t go away. It’s being covered by tons of blogs, made a splash at SXSW this year and is gaining more public attention from the likes of Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. It’s even getting continual coverage by well-known bloggers like Scoble and Leo Laporte. I consider myself in touch with the pulse of tech trends and have a good track record predicting the ultimate success of new startups, but in this case, I must be out to lunch. I’m left here empty handed and asking myself “Why the hype?”.

Any of you tried Twitter? Still using it? Find it annoying? Useful? Do tell, cuz I’d sure like to know what I’m missing.

Here’s 5 easy steps to getting a $1343.92 cell phone bill:

1. Sign up for a 900 min per month voice plan
2. Add on the Unlimited Data option
3. Add on 200 text message option
4. Cingular makes a mistake and forgets to add on the Unlimited Data option, charging me 1 cent per kilobyte
5. Become a text message fiend and send 1322 text message in one month

Result: $1343.92 cell phone bill for a single month.

Obviously there is no way I’m paying this, and have already contacted Cingular about their mistake on my data plan.  One thing I really need to do is to get a beefier text message plan