Does this apply to all Twilio numbers, or just short codes?
All US Twilio numbers.
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Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#32Well, all the kudos should go to Bandwidth.com the primary carrier of of Twilio, Plivo, Google Voice, etc ...
Can you elaborate on the relationship between Twilio and Bandwidth.com? I actually have very little understanding of what happens once Twilio receives an API request.
Bandwidth.com being a wholesale carrier of VoIP services is the primary carrier for Twilio, Plivo, Google Voice, etc...
Bandwidth delivers SMS over SMPP. Initially the MMS launch was due for mid October, seems they launched it ahead of time.
In the following weeks you'll see lots of different providers announcing their MMS capability.
Bandwidth should get the credit for their brilliant work.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#33Now if we could just get Google Voice to support it, that would be awesome.
It seems like with the hangouts/google voice merger on android that it does now support it, but I haven't tested myself personally to see.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the relationship between Twilio and Bandwidth.com? I actually have very little understanding of what happens once Twilio receives an API request.
Bandwidth.com being a wholesale carrier of VoIP services is the primary carrier for Twilio, Plivo, Google Voice, etc... Bandwidth delivers SMS over SMPP. Initially the MMS launch was due for mid October, seems they launched it ahead of time. In the following weeks you'll see lots of different providers announcing their MMS capability. Bandwidth should get the credit for their brilliant work.
Bandwidth are indeed a bunch of bright folks that do good work and we work with them on a number of products, but to be clear we are not reselling their messaging.
Lot of effort by a large crew of committed developers and the helpful participation of our carrier partners are what brought Twilio MMS to market on US phone numbers. Were MMS as easy as wrapping another product in a HTTP request, I imagine it would be a more common offering.
Want to make sure the effort of the Twilio engineering crew is given its due.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#35Well, all the kudos should go to Bandwidth.com the primary carrier of of Twilio, Plivo, Google Voice, etc ...
Cool, next time you spend three years and literally thousands of hours bringing a product to market, I'll be sure to assign the credit to someone else
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#36Can someone explain a little bit more? I think I've been spoilt rotten by the web API world.
Don't telcos provide MMS gateway like how they provide SMS gateways? What is actually happening under the hood here?
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#37Can someone explain a little bit more? I think I've been spoilt rotten by the web API world. Don't telcos provide MMS gateway like how they provide SMS gateways? What is actually happening under the hood here?
Lots actually. MMS is hard - multiple devices with no consistency, different interconnect gateways that can mangle messages along the way. An easy to use, reliable and pervasive MMS gateway isn't as easy to implement as some might think and the carriers haven't made it a priority. In fact the US carriers completely messed up their early MMS implementations with Washington-style regulation that made the user experience beyond horrible. Here's hoping Twilio makes some progress with this and I wish them much success.
EDIT: I realized that I didn't actually answer your question. MMS can be supported by carriers in different ways but the most typical interface is MM7 which is SOAP over HTTP. There are many MM7 gateway vendors and they all handle MIME boundaries, payloads, transcoding, etc different - subtle differences, but enough to make testing against a large matrix of devices very, very hard.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#38This is an amazing biz dev achievement. Twilio seems to be getting closer to aggregating all of the hard stuff in telco land every day. It's hard to overstate just how hard this is to do. This isn't as simple as going to an aggregator and getting SMS done, MMS has been one of the last bastions of exerted carrier influence and it's slowly being democratized. This is the first time I can recall someone getting this lev…
It seems like it would be the first time someone has done it properly. What is so beautiful about Twilio is their attention to detail for developers - amazing documentation, samples, etc so I am assuming their MMS implementation will be as clean. Here's hoping.
mBlox, OpenMarket, Mobile365 all tried to implement the half assed MMS implementation forced on them by the carrier market and it was an absolutely nightmare. I'm surprised noone in the tech press ever did a deep dive expose on just how archaic the whole certification process was, and the user experience was terrible.
Summary: this is not the first time the carriers have opened up MMS. Hopefully it will be the first time developers can leverage MMS the way it was intended.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#39Man, if they'd just add fax they'd have basically every possible telephonic service there is.
Re: Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
#40Man, if they'd just add fax they'd have basically every possible telephonic service there is.
Just FYI, there's a fax API service similar to Twilio already named Phaxio[1]. Not affiliated, just a fan[2].