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My apologies if this post has the taste of sour grapes but the recent rise of Group Messaging Startups are an example of low barrier of entry.
About the time Padpaw was shutdown, Twilio, an innovative telecommunications company, started offering SMS services to developers. Using a straightforward REST API, any web site could send and receive text messages to US carrier cell phones. Before Twilio, Padpaw and other companies had to sign agreements with SMS Aggregators, get shortcodes, and have ‘campaigns’ approved by all the carriers. You were lucky to get your text messaging up and running in 12 weeks. With Twilio, you were up in minutes.
Before long, a number of startups appeared offering mobile group messaging started to appear. They’re all similar; create a group, invite your friends, send a message that gets forwarded to everyone. Initially the services worked over SMS, but cost has driven many to add apps for iPhone and Android to route messages.
Running an SMS service used to be barrier to entry. Twilio, God bless them, removed that barrier but instead of seeing some really cool innovated ways to communicate and organize groups of people, we see a half a dozen companies put a chat room on a phone.
Kids - you can do better!
