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I find it interesting that you can get the mobile carrier from this. The first thing I pictured was a voice phishing attack: "Hello, this is T-Mobile, there's a problem with your account..." you get the gist.
Any plans on open sourcing the formatting library?
It's a good functionality, but (at least for me) would mainly be useful for view-layer on-the-fly formatting, and we wouldn't use an remote API request for that.
Sort of like Strip's jQuery.payment[1], it would be a simple and clever marketing trick. People searching for a phone number formatting library are just the people you want to sell your services to.
EDIT: just found libphonenumber, which does local formatting[2]
[1] https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment [2] https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber
Really neat! Any plans on open sourcing the formatting library? It's a good functionality, but (at least for me) would mainly be useful for view-layer on-the-fly formatting, and we wouldn't use an remote API request for that. Sort of like Strip's jQuery.payment[1], it would be a simple and clever marketing trick. People searching for a phone number formatting library are just the people you want to sell your services…
Wish they returned city, state, and ZIP information for domestic numbers like Telesign does. Telesign is outrageously expensive.
Hey Jon - Rob from Twilio here. Good feedback - appreciate you sharing. We do have geographic information with each webhook sharing city, state and zip - agree it would be useful to have this in the Lookup resources as well.
Wish they returned city, state, and ZIP information for domestic numbers like Telesign does. Telesign is outrageously expensive.
Hey Jon - Rob from Twilio here. Good feedback - appreciate you sharing. We do have geographic information with each webhook sharing city, state and zip - agree it would be useful to have this in the Lookup resources as well.
If you did add geographic info, what would it be base on? area code/NXX? How relevant would it be considering LNP?
My telco was charging $8/month for visual voicemail, so I opted to buy a Twilio number for $1/month, and set my phone to forward no answer/busy/unavailable to a simple Twilio app I wrote that handles voicemail. When someone leaves me a message, I get an SMS with the message and caller details. I've been using OpenCNAM ( https://www.opencnam.com ) for the caller ID look-up. I implemented something similar for our offi…
Really neat! Any plans on open sourcing the formatting library? It's a good functionality, but (at least for me) would mainly be useful for view-layer on-the-fly formatting, and we wouldn't use an remote API request for that. Sort of like Strip's jQuery.payment[1], it would be a simple and clever marketing trick. People searching for a phone number formatting library are just the people you want to sell your services…
Swedish landlines seems to not work. I manage to lookup my old mobile phone number and it say Sweden correctly. But if I input +4686736000 I get 404 back.
Although I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a "Twilio dev" I do implement the service whenever I need to spin up some sort of easy SMS functionality. That said, any ideas for what you could use this for? I'm actually interested in building a sample app for it, I'm just trying to think of a sexier use case than localization and spam-detection. Is that as good as it gets?
1) Smarter Routing - quite a few developers have expressed they'd like to know whether or not a phone number is a landline or not before attempting to send a text message. Twilio Lookup will describe whether the number is mobile, landline, or voip so you can choose the appropriate communication to reach the number.
2) Error Checking - While libraries like libphonenumber are useful for determining if a number can possibly exist, there are some conditions where determining if a number does exist is more valuable. This can be used for error checking - if I as a user input a typo in my phone number (e.g. I mistype my personal phone number as '(347) 193-6073' which does not exist instead of '(347) 923-6073')
I also suspect across larger applications carrier info might also contain useful demography. For example, knowing that your users in Montana mostly use Verizon might inform your advertising to surface more CDMA devices in that market.
Ultimately this will probably end up like every other product we release - the killer use case is one we never even considered.