How does one receive and post text messages on a website, a la Twitter?

Question

I've looked around at pretty much all the SMS posts here on SO and the best answer I've come up with so far is ZeepMobile. The only problem is, they're "in beta" and aren't readily accepting users no longer in operation. Is there a workaround for this, maybe receiving an email via text (kind of like how TwitPic does it?) somehow and parsing it?

Basically all I want to do is have people text the site so that their message posts... I don't need to send any messages (actually I would prefer not to). Pretty much the same functionality as Twitter (same functionality, but no I'm not building a Twitter-esque service because I am not crazy).

PS this will be a VB.NET ASP.NET 3.5 solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

You'll need to use an SMS gateway service, which is basically a telecom type service which takes text messages and turns them into http (or whatever) requests. There are a number of such services out there other than ZeepMobile if you just do a search on "SMS providers". (My guess is you're looking for a free provider, which is why you mentioned them)

The bottom line is, you are going to need some other service to interface between your application and the telecom portion. You can't just write some code and expect text messages to start coming in.