I came across this absolutely fantastic overview from Webmonkey that shows you how to create an SMS notification application in no time. I reckon it would take me about 20 minutes, using their code samples, to knock it together.
If you’ve got a working knowledge of PHP, I challenge you to take 20 minutes and knock this together. You don’t need to be a programming demigod. If you setup your own WordPress account on some webspace, you can probably do this, no hassle.
The How-To uses mobile services company, TextMarks — one of my favourite American services. They take care of all the texting stuff.
All you need to do is a bit of code hacking. (i.e. cut, paste, publish, test).
I think this is brilliant, brilliant stuff. You too can create a Twitter clone, basically. The How-To (it’s actually a wiki page, so it’s editable if you’d like to improve it) takes you through creating a service that lets you query the sunrise and sunset times based on you texting a keyword and providing a city, state or zip.
This is exactly what UK companies Esendex and AQL should be doing. Wiki-how-tos that really let folk innovate without forcing too much thinking.