<story><title>How Twilio screwed us over</title><url>http://feint.me/2010/09/how-twilio-screwed-us-over/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffiel</author><text>Just posted this on Anthony&apos;s blog, but thought I would post it here as well:&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Hi Anthony,&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sorry that you feel we were&apos;t straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature.  Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status.  We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums.  Our apologies that we weren&apos;t clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app.&lt;p&gt;We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations.  Please feel free to email me at jeff@twilio.com, I&apos;m always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern.&lt;p&gt;Sincerely,&lt;p&gt;Jeff Lawson
Co-Founder &amp;#38; CEO
Twilio.com</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradgessler</author><text>Guys, I need to back Jeff up on this.&lt;p&gt;SMS is just a huge pain in the ass. The carriers have a strangle-hold over this and can cut messages off on a whim. We had an experience once with Verizon where they &quot;accidentally&quot; cut-off our short-code to Poll Everywhere on a Friday evening due to some &quot;clerical errors&quot;. 72 hours later they finally had somebody &quot;fix&quot; the situation (support doesn&apos;t work on weekends there), and in the meantime we were left in a really bad place trying to explain to our customers how Verizon screwed us over.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve dealt with some total dopes at Celltrust (I need to call these guys out, they&apos;re atrociously bad. Please don&apos;t do business with them unless you absolutely have to) where our service to Canada was entirely out for a week because they changed how their API worked. They failed to communicate that to us and nobody at their company could tell me how it worked so I had to fire up nc -l, point their gateway at that server, find somebody from Canada who could send a text, and see what came in. After the fact, I told them how horrible the experience was and provided recommendations on how they could improve it. They threatened to cut us off as a client because they felt I was being mean to them instead of acting on the feedback that could have made their service better.&lt;p&gt;Twilio thinks this is assine and are trying to change how this all works. We&apos;ve shared with them the pains we&apos;ve experienced with SMS aggregators and they share the same thoughts with us that its a totally unnecessary amount of pain that developers face to build SMS applications. They&apos;re really trying to make this easier and lower the bar.&lt;p&gt;Anthony, while your experience wasn&apos;t that hot, it was far and above what you&apos;d experience elsewhere. At least Jeff acknowledges that Twilio could do better. That is so far above and beyond anything else in the industry. Throw on top of that an amazingly well executed API and the drive to make a difference in this industry and you&apos;re in good hands.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Twilio screwed us over</title><url>http://feint.me/2010/09/how-twilio-screwed-us-over/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffiel</author><text>Just posted this on Anthony&apos;s blog, but thought I would post it here as well:&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Hi Anthony,&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sorry that you feel we were&apos;t straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature.  Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status.  We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums.  Our apologies that we weren&apos;t clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app.&lt;p&gt;We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations.  Please feel free to email me at jeff@twilio.com, I&apos;m always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern.&lt;p&gt;Sincerely,&lt;p&gt;Jeff Lawson
Co-Founder &amp;#38; CEO
Twilio.com</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redstripe</author><text>Is there a page that lists all the beta features that may become unsupported without warning in the future?</text></comment>