Who benefits from designing a protocol and network for exchanging multimedia messages that makes it "politically difficult" for new entities to participate, and requires years of work plus owning an "MMSC," which you make sound difficult?
From an Internet point of view, it seems obvious that the value of this protocol and network grows with the number of participating entities. We've understood this since the days of fax machines and Metcalf's law.
I assume the competition here is MIME e-mail with picture/video attachments, which is implemented most places and works pretty well and doesn't take years of work.
If you make your own protocol hard for others to join, you're more likely to lose. (Just as the Information Superhighway and OSI protocols lost in the 1990s to the underdog Internet.)
The wireless providers in the US do their best to keep SMS a walled garden. They severely restrict what you're allowed to do. In some way this is a good idea as cuts down on spam.
As far as the complex protocol part, I'm too familiar with MMS exactly although I did read the SMPP spec once. I get the feeling the complexity is partially design by committee as well as a bunch of referencing other "standards" by the ITU. For example, for text messages, there's a language identifier for "Pennsylvania Dutch".
The upside to any complex protocol is that it raises the bar to entry. If you can make implementation 10x more difficult, and you're a large company, the extra implementation cost hurts you little, but might prevent a smaller competitor from getting in because they don't handle strange cases. It's hard to tell whether the complexity in protocols comes from this malicious intent, or just incompetence.
Truthfully, my personal track record for predicting protocol success isn't particularly good. There is an old essay on gopher's "resurrection" that I really hope no one is able to find anymore.
All I know is that a whole lot of our customers asked for it, so we built it. Took us a long time, but I'm very stoked for the response developers are giving us at Twiliocon.
We recently launched a product with a couple short codes with you guys. We intended "going direct" as volume and time permitted (we are not telecom nerds...)
My co-founder, hell bent on getting MMS as soon as possible lead the charge. We would meetings where I would repeatedly say "bullshit", and he'd say "no, really... it is the most fubar'd thing you've ever seen"
So a stoked response is an understatement, anyone that has looked into doing this knows you guys hit a homer and I'm looking forward to the wild ride of mobile comm and seeing how push, texting and all that play out. I think MMS available to developers en masse gives it a big push in the right direction and I'm beyond excited that our short codes are hosted with twilio!
Who benefits from designing a protocol and network for exchanging multimedia messages that makes it "politically difficult" for new entities to participate, and requires years of work plus owning an "MMSC," which you make sound difficult?
From an Internet point of view, it seems obvious that the value of this protocol and network grows with the number of participating entities. We've understood this since the days of fax machines and Metcalf's law.
I assume the competition here is MIME e-mail with picture/video attachments, which is implemented most places and works pretty well and doesn't take years of work.
If you make your own protocol hard for others to join, you're more likely to lose. (Just as the Information Superhighway and OSI protocols lost in the 1990s to the underdog Internet.)
What are the upsides to doing it this way?