<story><title>How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates</title><url>http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2010/06/how-i-built-a-multi-user-door-buzzer-for-our-apartment/</url><text>full disclosure - I work on Twilio, which I used for this</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>I love Twilio, let me count the ways.  Doing flow control of an online or offline process from a phone is awesomely powerful.  (Particularly cell phones.)&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s a related example which I&apos;m busy coding today: I wanted people to be able to record custom appointment reminders, but (following many years of supporting non-technical users) think microphones and MP3 encoding are probably beyond their ken.  So instead, when you click &quot;Send Mary Smith a custom reminder&quot; on the site, it pops up a lightbox saying &quot;Call 555-123-1234 and type in the code 1234&quot;, and when you do so the phone will say &quot;Leave your custom message for Mary Smith&apos;s appointment on June 16th from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM after the beep.&quot;  Then, after doing so, your lightbox automatically closes and you get visual indication of success.&lt;p&gt;Bonus points: registering new numbers in Twilio is so cheap that I can trivially afford to give every customer their own call-in number, and tell them to put it on speed dial.  Then I can use the same basic pattern for any number of tasks.</text></comment>
<story><title>How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates</title><url>http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2010/06/how-i-built-a-multi-user-door-buzzer-for-our-apartment/</url><text>full disclosure - I work on Twilio, which I used for this</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sstrudeau</author><text>This is really cool! When I was in the roommate situation, we just posted buzzer codes composed of dots &amp;#38; dashes next to each name.</text></comment>