Installation

Simply download the plugin, place the entire folder in your WordPress /plugins/ folder, and activate.

Usage

It currently uses Clickatell’s gateway services, though more could be supported in the future. Once you get login credentials to Clickatell’s http gateway you can start sending messages easily.

Simply instantiate the class with your credentials:

$mysms = new wpSMS( $API_ID, $USERNAME, $PASSWORD );

Then send your message:

$mysms->send( $YOUR_MESSAGE, $TO_PHONE_NUMBER );

How you create the message or get the destination phone number is up to you.

Screenshots

• You’ve found an interesting book in our library, but who wants to write down the location and call number when you can text it to yourself?
  
• Clicking the “text this to me” link takes you to a screen where you preview the message and enter your mobile number.
  
• The received message includes all the details you need to find the book on the shelf.
  

I received the following message from Clickatell, the SMS gateway provider I use to programmatically send text messages to cell phones:

Please be advised that US carrier Verizon Wireless has announced that they will be charging an additional 3c per SMS for all application originated mobile terminated messaging beginning November 1, 2008. This increase will apply to standard rate and premium programs only through the Verizon Wireless network. Transaction fees will not apply to Free-2-End-User, Mobile Giving or Non-Profit organizational programs, according to Verizon. In addition, it has been reported that Verizon Wireless customers are no longer receiving a delivery confirmation notice after sending SMS messages – a long-time standard SMS service feature popular with subscribers and available on other carrier networks.

As your trusted partner and the voice of over 8,000 Clickatell customers to the wireless carrier industry; we believe these sudden and significant pricing and service changes made by Verizon are detrimental to the mobile industry as a whole. In response, we are working with several partners and industry leaders to strongly voice our concerns about the impact these abrupt changes from Verizon will have on the entire messaging industry. Additionally, we are working to obtain more information on specific policy details and timelines.

Unfortunately, Verizon Wireless has provided little in the way of an explanation as to the reasons behind these announcements and abrupt changes. At this time, your Clickatell account representative and our support centre will not have much more information to share about the reasons behind these changes. However, please be assured that we value your business and know that we are doing everything reasonable and within our power to influence Verizons’ decision as we understand the impact this may have to you, our customer.

For perspective, this represents a 50% price hike to service Verizon Wireless customers. (thankfully I’m no longer one of them). They’re betting that people like me will decide to pay, but I’m not so sure.

Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above.

Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.

The messages are handled by Clickatell via an API I added to bSuite, my do-everything plugin for WordPress (hmmm…what else can we SMS enable?).

Old instructions that connect the Mac OS X Address Book app to a phone via Bluetooth from O’Reilly and SillyDog. Once paired, the Address Book can initiate dialing, notify the user of incoming calls, and send SMS texts.

Bluetooth Texter SMS Widget, message2net, and BluePhoneElite all offer further tools to interact with your Bluetooth-connected mobile phone. The list of compatible phones (BPE & m2n) offers some leads for those trying to make the connection.

Finally, Simon Winter offers some tips on interacting with SMS via AppleScript.

bluetooth, mac, mac os x, sms, texting, applescript, cell phone

College sports are big business, so recruiting student athletes is big business. The NCAA limits the times coaches and recruiters can call or visit athletes, but text messages are all fair game. For now.

The Chronicle of Higher Education explained in an October 2006 story:

Before Chandler Parsons committed to play basketball for the University of Florida, his cellphone buzzed more than 100 times a day with text messages from college coaches.

The attention flattered the 6-foot-9 high-school senior from Winter Park, Fla. His cellular plan included unlimited text messages, so the onslaught did not run up his bill. And in some cases, the quick exchanges helped him get to know prospective coaches.

But the novelty soon wore off. “All these different coaches would text me saying the same thing,” he says, like “Hey, great game,” or “Look forward to hearing from you soon.” To make room for new messages, he had to empty his inbox twice a day. “It got a little crazy,” he says.

Now, the NCAA has proposed a ban on text messaging and is set to vote on the measure today.

Whatever the vote, it’s clear coaches had not only tapped into a loophole in NCAA rules, they’re following the trend in communications. A 2004 study in South Korea revealed a preference for texting over emailing, with two-thirds of students saying they rarely email, but SMS messages were up 40% year over year. A July 2005 Pew Internet Study found US teens preferring texting (via IM and SMS) over email — “email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with ‘adults.’”

sms, texting, ncaa, recruiting, ban, text messaging, text messages, college sports, communication, student athletes

We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t?

cameraphone, civil liberties, facial recognition, license plate recognition, mms, mobile technology, picture phone, privacy, sms, snooping

I happened to stumble back onto the Pew Internet Report on teens and technology from July 2005 that report that told us “87% of [US children] between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.” But the part I’d missed before regarded how these teens were using communication technology:

Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging [SMS] as ways to connect with their friends.

To them, email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges.

It is also used as a place of personal expression. Through buddy icons or other customization of the look and feel of IM communications, teens can express and differentiate themselves. Other instant messaging tools allow for the posting of personal profiles, or even “away” messages, durable signals posted when a user is away from the computer but wishes to remain connected to their IM network.

Interesting. Connect that with a 2004 Korean study of student’s communication practices that revealed more than two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents “rarely use or don’t use e-mail at all.” Why?

…it’s impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right away and replies are not immediately forthcoming. [...] “The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately,” said Professor Lee. “The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation.”

Interesting. American teens say email is for old people, Korean high-school and college students say it’s too slow, and UNH’s students tells us they chat away an average of 9.3 hours a week in AIM.

aim, aol instant messenger, communication, im, instant messaging, instant messenger, short message service, sms, technology, teens, the death of email, youth

SMS to construction sign (at Engadget and Textually), and SMS to megaphone — for the armchair protester (at Textually and Engadget).

sms, integration, megaphone

Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in April. What is surprising is that mobile phone companies got involved in the investigation. This AP report tells the story:

Phone companies voluntarily handed over the mobile phone numbers of people who were in or around Feyenoord’s Kuip stadium on the day of the match — traceable using broadcasting masts in the area.

So that’s what the aGPS sticker on our cellphones is about.

Via Engadget.

tags: 5-0, agps, cell phone, cellphone, crime, engadget, feyenoord, football, gps, hooliganism, location aware, location aware technology, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phone companies, mobile phone numbers, police, police investigation, riot, rioting, rioters, sms, sms message, sms messaging, soccer

My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that describes how to send SMS messages with iChat (would also work with any AIM client).

But there are other solutions. Slipstick lists the email addresses for various networks’ email to SMS gateways. And, obviously, most networks have web forms to send SMSs. Here’s Verizon’s.

This leads to a few questions. In these days of number portability, how can a person identify the carrier for a particular phone number based on the number alone? Will these web and email to SMS gateways work for off-network numbers (i.e. will Nextel’s gateway send SMS to Sprint?)? Is there another network agnostic gateway besides the AIM service identified above?

About the picture: there are a number of entertaining sms-tagged photos on Flickr.

tags: aim client, aim to sms, email to sms, ichat, mobile text, send sms messages, sms, sms gateway, sms gateways, sms messaging, texting, web to sms