Twitter for international text messaging (SMS)

International text messaging - Twitter to the rescue

For those who dont know what twitter is, it is basically a microblogging service over SMS (text messages). Check out Wikipedia explanation or better yet try it out Twitter or even see my Twitter page

So I started exploring/playing around with twitter late last year.

Now although text messaging aka SMS is not that big in the US (it is slowly picking up), it is really popular in Europe, Asia etc. So now, I have never been able to text my brother in India from Sprint PCS. Dont understand quite why but Sprint only allows sending SMS to select carriers in India. Here's the
list of international carriers that Sprint allows international text messaging for. Now, if you notice Bharti Airtel is not in that list for India and they have like a 50%+ marketshare. Anyways to cut a long story short, I have never been able to text my brother in India and vice-versa.

Twitter comes to the rescue?
When I was in India last month, I got my brother connected to twitter and now by sending a SMS to a US number (40404), I can send my brother a tweet (twitter lingo for a SMS) as a direct message which he receives a text (Note - direct messages are only send to the recipient) and he can do the same.

So its pretty cool as now we get to SMS/text each other all thanks to twitter.

Long time no post.. Pandora vs Last.fm

Havent posted in a long time.. I guess, thats what happens in the blogging world.. you start a blog and are all enthusiastic about and slowly get distracted/busy in other items.. well this time, I just need to make a better effort.

Ok now so i've been playing around with these social music services (namely last.fm and Pandora). Both of these offer a similar but differing music experiences. Pandora is more computerized/algorithmic whereas last.fm is all about user recommendation.

Here's an excellent comparison of these services by Steve Krause.

Right now, I just like to pop up either one of these and listen to similar artists and both have worked for me so far. Below are links to my pandora and last.fm pages

Pandora
Last.fm

Take a listen and let me know what you think. If any of you are on these services, link up to me.