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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#51

Post by toast0 »

foolfoolz wrote: post #14
Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…

they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded

SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy.

Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#52

Post by sethammons »

xwdv wrote: post #18

I’m hoping Cloudflare will eventually offer the SMS stuff that Twilio used to, along with other real time communications.

How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio than to add SMS to Cloudflare.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#53

Post by 1270018080 »

rsync wrote: post #47

I built an entire personal telco for myself using twilio apis and twiml bins, etc. This was encouraged by helpful “hacker” blog posts and official howtos detailing integrations with alert systems and home automation, etc. Twilio sold itself as useful infrastructure . All of this falls apart next month when A2P (or whatever it is) begins. Twilio polluted its own environment so completely that nobody can exist there an…

Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#54

Post by sethammons »

29athrowaway wrote: post #32
SamuelAdams wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries. If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?

Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.

Source?

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#55

Post by enono »

29athrowaway wrote: post #32
SamuelAdams wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries. If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?

Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.

[flagged]

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#56

Post by paulddraper »

ramy_d wrote: post #26
Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…

what's the alternative for something straightforward like that?

There isn't one. This headache is legal, not Twilio

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#57

Post by supriyo-biswas »

johndhi wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…

The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.

I wonder if Amazon SNS SMS (terrible naming there!) has the same constraints, I assume not.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#58

Post by joeythedolphin »

The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. Great products are built by companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up at your door for a job.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#59

Post by RobotToaster »

ramy_d wrote: post #26
Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…

what's the alternative for something straightforward like that?

A raspberry pi with a 4g hat?

Overkill I suppose, in the past for similar stuff I've used a microcontroller with a GPRS modem, but since the 2g switch off I'm not sure it can be done that simply.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#60

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jeffiel wrote: post #36

Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding! For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. As a developer,…

Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors?

Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it.

I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.

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