Email is a great way to monitor your webbots, as you learned in Chapter 15. An alternative to email messages is Short Message Service (SMS), or text messages. For a webbot developer, text messages have three major advantages over email:
Text messages are limited to 160 characters and force the sender to be succinct. Due to their brevity, text messages are more apt to be read than email messages.
People typically receive fewer text messages than emails, so text messages are more likely to stand out as being important.
Text messages may be read from simple cell phones. In contrast, email messages require more sophisticated phones, computers, or tablets.
Sending text messages from a webbot is not difficult. If your webbot can send email, as described in Chapter 15, your webbot can probably also send text messages. The key word here is probably, as many (if not most) mobile service providers offer SMS email gateway services. With these, you can send a text message to a cell phone by simply sending an email to the wireless subscriber’s SMS email gateway server, using the subscriber’s phone number or username as the addressee.