The technology behind Peabrain

[DW]

I'm really interested in what Peabrain is made on.  RoR?

What is your SMS provider, Twilio?  I may be starting an SMS project soon and will probably go with Twilio, everyone seems to love it.  But perhaps there is something better.  How is your experience w/ the SMS portion of this project so far?  Doing anything interesting to handle all of the messages coming in?

Thx,

d.

[Buster Benson]

You guessed right!  Ruby on Rails + Twilio.  Both are great tools.

[Drew Goodwin]

I built tidbytes.net on the same stack (RoR + Twilio). Setup could't have been easier, and Twilio's documentation and sandbox system are great.

One issue I've had is with SMS delivery. About 1 in 20 or 30 messages seem to be "lost." Could just be me—not enough Tidbytes users to be sure yet.

I found I could replicate this issue consistently with one message. Turns out to be something to do with encoding. The content was text I copied from a webpage and it contained a unicode apostrophe. This message is consistently dropped somewhere on the network and never appears in the Twilio logs. Twilio tech support was awesome, very helpful and proactive troubleshooters. Unfortunately however the conclusion was that the message is dropped before it reaches Twilio, and therefore outside their control to fix.

Other messages drops appear to be unrelated.

Drew

On Sunday, July 15, 2012 8:55:12 PM UTC-7, DW wrote:

[DW]

Ok, so it isn't just me.  I'm building a prototype of a SMS service on Google App Engine w/ Python and I've noticed while I'm testing that every once in a while a message is just dropped.  Google App Engine logs show the request and it sends a response but Twilio never gets it.  Doesn't seem to be an encoding issue.  It's not too often though, at least not yet.

I agree that Twilio is super awesome and easy.  Coupled w/ Google App Engine it's a bit ridiculous how cheap and quickly I can get something up.