Ho John Lee’s Weblog

If you have a Yahoo account, you can send a free SMS text message to any US cell phone. The message is sent with your Yahoo e-mail address in the “From” information field, making it possible to reply directly to the message using MMS.

The service is provided using an HTTP GET interface, making it easy to construct links and forms that will send SMS messages from a web page.

A working example of a web form and more info is at Russell Beattie’s Notebook.

The neat thing is that because the form uses GET, you can actually create a link on your page that uses the same tech: Send “This is a test” to 415-555-1234. [Update: Tim Bray says: “Don’t do this, you moron!” Doh! Duly noted.]

Yeah, you can pretty much do the same with a teleflip.com email, but this will have a “from” of your Yahoo Mail, which is actually quite useful, as the recipient can respond instantly with an MMS message. If you have filters set up on your Y! Mail, you can then get notified as well… You can also pop your phone number in the form by default and put this in the side of your blog, for example, and have people contact you where ever you are (as long as they have a Y! ID) - that’s pretty cool if you think about it.

I just sent a test SMS message to my phone using a hand-crafted URL, and received it in about 5 seconds. Pretty handy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2005 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Wireless, Personal Technology, Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.