KalSMS is a very thin layer between SMS to HTTP and back to SMS. For example, a simple SMS weather service works like this:

1. A user sends an SMS “weather 10026″ to a phone running KalSMS
2. KalSMS intercepts the SMS message, and sends it to pre defined URL. In this case http://qkhack.appspot.com/weather?msg=weather+10026
3. In this URL, a script uses Yahoo!Weather API to get the weather forecast for zip code 10025, and formats an XML response like:

   <reply>
     <sms-to-sender>
       Fair 37F today, Mostly Clear 34F tomorrow, Partly Cloudy 37F Friday
     </sms-to-sender>
   </reply>
   

4. KalSMS parses the response, and sends an SMS back to the user with the weather forecast.

In effect the phone running KalSMS has now become an SMS server, running a weather application.

I’ve been working recently on applications that are meant to be used in places like India and Africa. This taught me that (a) SMS is accessible by a LOT more people worldwide than the web, and (b) it is MUCH harder to build an SMS app than a web app.

KalSMS tries to help this by leaving the heavy lifting to a web app, and just providing a simple, as thin as possible layer between SMS to the Web and back again. This means developers can work with the tools they already know, use state of art technologies like Heroku or App Engine that make launching a web app extremely simple and cheap, and just use an Android phone to enable the SMS part.

Current solutions require either collaboration from a local cellular provider, often a challenge for low budget projects, or setting up your own server – that is, an actual computer running the SMS gateway software connected to a cellular modem. This is non-trivial to install and maintain, and since the solutions out there are tightly coupled you have to write your actual application in a specific language or framework dictated by the SMS solution.

By being Android-based, KalSMS installation is a matter of scanning a barcode, maintenance means keeping the phone working – something almost all people in the world now know how to do. Basically an Android phone with KalSMS replaces a computer, network connection, cell modem, a UPS system and whole bunch of software.

I’ve got plenty of opinions on aid efforts and their effects over the years, but in keeping with the unwritten “produce or shut up” motto of this blog I’ll just say I think things will start to improve when more people pay attention to Bill Easterly than Bono. In my corner, I hope hackers will use KalSMS for various projects simply for its simplicity and reliability – and perhaps in time will seep into the developing world projects I had in mind when building it.

Don has some kind words for TheRealURL, too:

This is done by using the API found at: http://therealurl.appspot.com/. I know this is the second time I have switched backends. This new backend is even faster and supports every single url shortening service I have tried.

Thanks :)

I installed it on my Chrome and it works great. Note that the UI is a bit different from the Firefox extension – rather than displaying the long URL in the status bar, it inserts it in the HTML instead of the short one. So now we got Firefox, Thunderbird and Chrome covered (all, by the way, thanks to the kindness of developers I’ve never met, volunteering their code). If someone wants to do an IE/Safari/Opera extensions, let me know – I’d be happy to help any way I can.

Here’s a short guide to the confused user: How To Disable Google Buzz. It’s not in sarcastic font but if you’re reading this you probably don’t need it. (BTW, I think a good indicator for when a community gets too big is that sarcasm needs to be explained: it means members don’t trust each other’s intelligence enough to assume outlandish claims are meant sarcastically).

My point obviously isn’t that Google Buzz should or shouldn’t be disabled, my point is that most of these things take only as much of your life as you allow them, so all the hyperbole around Google Buzz (or iPad, or whatever) is pointless.

It’s my first time trying out AdSense too – please feel free to click on the ads, I’m sure these are all fantastic products and services.

While we’re at it, I’d like to suggest a one reason why Google botched Buzz’s launch like that: when you launch something on top of Gmail, you just don’t get the chance to grow organically, learning from mistakes and user feedback as you go. There are a lot of benefits to size, but also some drawbacks.

Finally, I really enjoy my new habit of adding pictures to posts. I hope readers like it too. Here’s a photo of a shiny object:

Here’s what this first public day looks like in traffic:

Keeping in mind it’s Christmas, and the site was down for a while till I fixed up the server, I’m pretty happy with that. But the real surprise is here:

There were less than 10 crowds in the system, so this means 1 in every 4 new visitors created a crowd. That’s pretty incredible. Maybe the holiday timing helped here. Maybe allowing users to log in with their Google accounts. Having to process 12,274 feeds a day might prove a bit of a challenge though…

I always assumed there’s a high entry barrier for CM users since they have to load in quite a few feeds to make it useful. Visitors so far seem to have no issues with that, most just importing their feeds list via OPML. Obviously these are not the typical Web users, but that’s ok. Crowds Machine isn’t meant to be mainstream – that’s the whole point of it.

We haven’t done much in way of publicizing the site, so it was great to be accepted into Stanford’s Peace Dot directory. Peace Dot only adds one organization per day to the directory, and we’re excited to finally get in :) They even do a little welcome video for each site, here’s Standord’s BJ Fogg welcoming us:

Thanks, Peace Dot!

Technically, HelloWorld is a simple Google App Engine based chat, written in Python. The focus was less on the chat code and more on making the application easy to customize and adapt for various sites. The look can be completely changed by editing two HTML files, and being App Engine based makes deployment extremely simple and cheap.

Sites built on top of HelloWorld might be used to foster dialog between sides in a conflict, aid in reconciliation phases, or help people going through their own struggle with a disease or addiction talk with others in the same situation. The anonymity allows users to speak frankly where it may often be difficult or dangerous to do so, and hopefully some may later move on to talk via Skype or Email – our goal is to be the easily accessed and risk free gateway to a dialog.

While forums and multi-user chats have important roles, a one to one conversation has a unique value of its own. Talking one to one makes slogans and cliches a lot harder to hide behind. It is a lesson I learned myself in the summer of 2006, when I happened into an IM conversation with a Lebanese person while both our parents’ towns were under fire by the other side. That experience was the inspiration for HelloWorld, I hope this tool would allow many more such conversations to take place.

(Found via FFFFOUND)

i love working on an obscure book. people cling to ideas, because they’re supposed to be vouchers for a million dollars. no, write an obscure book. build something outside all that pressure. i guess treehouses for kids qualify.

_why, Sep 2004

Where’s _why? I do hope all is OK.

function refresh_chat() {
	$.ajax({
	  	url: "/chat",
	   	data: "format=xhr&chat_id={{chat_id}}&cur_len=" + chat_content.length,
		  complete: function(xhr){					
				if (xhr.status == 200) render_chat(xhr.responseText);
				setTimeout("refresh_chat()", 5000)
		  }
	 });	
}

And the server code that handles it:

cur_len = self.request.get("cur_len", 0)
if len(chat.content) == int(cur_len):
	self.error(304) # return 304 Not Modified
else:
	self.response.out.write(chat.content) # return new content

That’s basically the standard approach. Pretty simple, works ok (could be optimized a bit, for example return only the actual new content etc). It’s not exactly an elegant design, though. Trying to use HTTP, designed as a Pull protocol, for an application that requires Push results creates this system of frequent server requests with empty responses, kind of like the “Are we there yet?” conversations with kids on long road trips.

Jack Moffitt’s JSConf talk introduced me to the concept of Long Polling, aka Comet or (with a lot added) BOSH, as a way to simulate HTTP Push. Rather than have the client sending a lot of short, frequent requests and the server responding to each as fast as possible, long polling turns it around: the server holds the requests as long as it can, returning a response only when it has new data or a timeout limit was hit. So, instead of sending request every 3 seconds, for example, you can send one every 30 seconds.

Client side code remains almost the same:

function refresh_chat() {
	$.ajax({
	  	url: "/chat",
	   	data: "format=xhr&chat_id={{chat_id}}&cur_len=" + chat_content.length,
		  complete: function(xhr){					
				if (xhr.status == 200) render_chat(xhr.responseText);
				setTimeout("refresh_chat()", 1000);
		  }
	 });
}

But on the server side, there’s a bit of new logic to keep checking for new content while the server holds the response:

cur_len = self.request.get("cur_len", 0)
end_by = int(time.time()) + 30

while int(time.time()) < end_by:
	if len(chat.content) != int(cur_len):
		return self.response.out.write(chat.content) # return new content
 	
	time.sleep(1)

self.error(304) # return 304 Not Modified

If you have any experience building web applications, you’ve spent a lot of effort making sure servers respond quickly to requests. Delaying the response is counter-intuitive, which in itself makes Comet useful to know, if only for its new perspective. However, this also makes production use a bit complicated, since most web server stacks are optimized for maximum requests/second rather than long concurrent requests. Content-rich sites often use separate servers for big media content for this reason, and Comet also has its own server (er “HTTP-based event routing bus”) in Cometd.

I don’t know about news value, but it’s pretty cool to be able to refresh that page now and then and get a snapshot of the current mood and happenings, in these possibly historic times there.

It was also cool to find another use for FeedVolley, which I neglected a bit recently ;) I added some page caching on top of the existing feed caching, to allow it to handle some traffic (Slicehost’s 256MB slices seem to start sending swap alerts as soon as traffic rises above negligible). The sources are basically the ones listed here, with a few additional ones I’m trying to find. In fact, if you really want to keep a close watch on what’s going on, you may want to watch the FriendFeed stream – the FeedVolley page is really just an HTML skin to make the feed look a little nicer (hopefully).

(Favorite tweet so far: “@jonobacon IRC is blocked. Tell our regards to Ubuntu Global Jam from Iran. I’m twitting the #iranElection story from a Kubuntu machine :)“. Makes me think of starting to use Twitter again..)

The examples on rmmbr’s home page are pretty much how I use it – I come across some term I want to research or am reminded of something I need to do and send an text message like rmmbr <whatever> to 41411. When I get back home an email is waiting in my Gmail inbox with the text sent, a Google search link for it, and if it’s an address or a date Gmail might also attach its “map this” or “add to calendar” links as well.

To start using it, you need to let rmmbr connect your phone # with your email address by texting rmmbr signup <your@email> to 41411. You’ll get a confirmation email and can start sending yourself messages. Just remember to always start the message with “rmmbr” – it still gets me sometimes..

I don’t know how useful it would be for anyone with an iPhone or a Blackberry, but if you’re like me and prefer to keep your cellphones small, cheap and low maintenance, you might find this a useful solution for your text-to-inbox needs. Enjoy :)

[Update: formerly rmbr, the app/sms code is now rmmbr, to prevent confusion with rmbr.com - which is a different product, not related to rmmbr in any way]