Twilio
Even since I first heard about Twilio last summer (first from Dave, and then from attending Jeff’s presentation at STS) I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and talking it up to every developer I meet.
Basically, Twilio is a API that allows you to build phone/voice based applications in a trivially easy way. The ability to build telephony apps isn’t new, but twilio lets you do it without investing in hardware, software, or learning complicated proprietary languages and syntaxes. With nothing but a little HTTP, some XML, and some RESTfulness, any web developer can be up and running with a new app in a matter of hours.
When I first saw tumblr’s call-to-post feature, I immediately thought “They should have used Twilio,” so I was very happy to hear that they did.
I’m not sure what the “killer app” is for twilio, but there are tons of obvious uses out there that are now easier than ever to build. And, as long as twilio keeps building their infrastructure and refining their api, the rest is really up to us. That’s the beauty of platforms…
