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Coming up with new ways of compressing data to travel down legacy or fundamentally anti-functional data channels (i.e. low bandwidth, low quality of data, high

Coming up with new ways of compressing data to travel down legacy or fundamentally anti-functional data channels (i.e. low bandwidth, low quality of data, high latency, preprocessing that destroys the majority of the experiencial data) is always a fun hack, but is never a marketable strategy for a few reasons. - It bets on technology going backwards rather than forwards (i.e. will have cheap android phones with cheap data plans before you can scale it) - It doesn't provide much more than novelty self promotion. "Hey i made a webpage deliver via SMS" - Its usually more expensive and time-consuming to produce what almost always becomes an inherently inferior product.

smtddr 12y ago
Now, let's take those 3 points and consider a 3rd world country with interwebz-censorship or very poor infrastructure and no forseeable future where it'll improve to anywhere near what most first-world countries have. Cellphone coverage is the easiest thing to setup in those kinds of environments.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Do you have any examples of such countries where at the same time SMS will still work and be cheap enough to be viable? Even most countries in sub-Saharan Africa has at least GPRS - most of them have 3G. Some of them are deploying LTE. Certainly there will be areas where for some time still there will still be limited data access, but the question is how many of those areas actually has functioning cell coverage.
throwaway82230 12y ago
Sounds about par for course for a hackathon project.
enthdegree 12y ago
THANK YOU for this very lucid post!!! People who have access to these services almost certainly have access to a data plan and would view it as a novelty rather than a means of communication. I learned this the hard way by having done a very similar project a year ago, but then basically lost interest as soon as I got a smartphone. Here is my self-promotion: * http://nerdhow.net/uzblsms-a-way-to-browse-the-web-via-text-message/ http://nerdhow.net/uzblsms-a-way-to-browse-the-web-via-text-... * and of course I had it on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835365 It's open-sores and free to set up and use (if you have a text plan) It would be pretty easy to turn it into a sms terminal which might be negligibly more useful (using a PTY with the kbd is easier than using an X Server). I guess the OP's project and mine would be perfectly equivalent if anyone's written a text-only, line-based browser, but I stopped short of this. Maybe someone else will make one? (: My biggest takeaway from the whole project was how easy it is to fall into the trap of doing something just to be able to pat yourself on the back. Real altruism isn't this cheap.
- sosborn 12y ago
  >open-sores By far my favorite unintentional turn of phrase I have seen today :)

smtddr 12y ago

Now, let's take those 3 points and consider a 3rd world country with interwebz-censorship or very poor infrastructure and no forseeable future where it'll improve to anywhere near what most first-world countries have. Cellphone coverage is the easiest thing to setup in those kinds of environments.

vidarh 12y ago
Do you have any examples of such countries where at the same time SMS will still work and be cheap enough to be viable? Even most countries in sub-Saharan Africa has at least GPRS - most of them have 3G. Some of them are deploying LTE. Certainly there will be areas where for some time still there will still be limited data access, but the question is how many of those areas actually has functioning cell coverage.

throwaway82230 12y ago

Sounds about par for course for a hackathon project.

enthdegree 12y ago

THANK YOU for this very lucid post!!! People who have access to these services almost certainly have access to a data plan and would view it as a novelty rather than a means of communication. I learned this the hard way by having done a very similar project a year ago, but then basically lost interest as soon as I got a smartphone. Here is my self-promotion: * http://nerdhow.net/uzblsms-a-way-to-browse-the-web-via-text-message/ http://nerdhow.net/uzblsms-a-way-to-browse-the-web-via-text-... * and of course I had it on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5835365 It's open-sores and free to set up and use (if you have a text plan) It would be pretty easy to turn it into a sms terminal which might be negligibly more useful (using a PTY with the kbd is easier than using an X Server). I guess the OP's project and mine would be perfectly equivalent if anyone's written a text-only, line-based browser, but I stopped short of this. Maybe someone else will make one? (: My biggest takeaway from the whole project was how easy it is to fall into the trap of doing something just to be able to pat yourself on the back. Real altruism isn't this cheap.

sosborn 12y ago
>open-sores By far my favorite unintentional turn of phrase I have seen today :)