I recently bought a new cell phone (iPhone) but did not get a data plan because they are ridiculously expensive. I do, however, like many people, have a far more cost-effective unlimited text plan. I have yet to find a good interactive SMS (text messaging) service which you can interact with while on the go to obtain information. An example would be google sms service (the best one I've found), but even that needs a little work. Wouldn't it be awesome to interact with your computer via sms? Ask it to do stuff? Retrieve information (addresses, contacts, phone numbers, turn off your lights, that sort of thing)? We need a way to communicate from the cell phone TO the computer. Fortunately for us, we have services like twitter and facebook which allow us to very quickly update our status or post a "tweet" via SMS. See where this is going? All we need to do is sign up for a twitter/Facebook account (and make it private) and write a very simple interface to check for twitter/facebook updates via SMS. We can then retrieve the text that was sent from the phone. So, for example: If you want to know the address of the nearest pizza pizza, you could write a simple program to fetch twitter/facebook updates and parse the text and perform a search action, for example. The possibilities are vast. Once the information has been obtained, it is very easy to send the data back to the phone. One way is to email @carrier.com, as most carriers provide a free email-to-sms gateway. The phone then receives the information it was looking for. You could also (theoretically) create a data-over-sms layer and encode the text in base 64 to get a (very) slow... um... Internet connection... I don't know if it's even worth mentioning since sms tends to take at least a few seconds to send/receive. What do you guys think? -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist