Sending stock quotes, scores, weather, etc. reminds me of a service that Google used to offer via text message. I used that a ton before I got my first smartphone: text W[ZIP code] to 46645 (GOOGL) and it would text back the weather. Same for stock:[symbol] and many other things I've since forgotten. Of course Google killed it, but it was neat while it lasted!
In my days of messing around with PHP, I wrote a Twitter bot called "SongBuddy" for the purpose of looking up a song via SMS based on some lyrics.
You would send it a DM via SMS (which Twitter supported at the time) containing a few lyrics, and it would do a Google search of "<your input> lyrics", parse the search results, and in theory return the artist and title to you via SMS.
Yet the currency conversion site I use which is run by one prof, probably on a Pentium III computer stashed under a stairwell at their university, has been up and running for decades and will probably last a lifetime.
I made a backend with Twilio and an AWS instance to give me a SMS<->ChatGPT interface.
That allows me to ask ChatGPT questions from anywhere on Earth via a handheld satellite communicator (inReach Mini 2). It's kind of nice to be able to ask ChatGPT things from the middle of death valley.
I used that all the time from my flip phone. It took forever to type out a google search and results could take a minute or two to arrive but it was better than nothing.
Primarily I used it to google the address of a place I wanted to go so I could enter that in my TomTom. Times have changed.
I'm curious when that was. I came up with this idea around 1995 while working for a telecoms research company (a subsidiary of Ericsson). Flight status updates was my canonical example.
Nobody imagined that P2P messaging (requiring multiple presses of a numeric keypad to type one character) would become as popular as it did, so an information service was the best use I could imagine, especially given the growing availability of data through the nascent Web. (Teletext was also still a thing, and we had a separate project for scraping that...)
But guess what those of us with access to SMS (and the general public) ended up using it for?
HTC Touch Pro 2 and I could type better on that than any phone since. Even managed to get it running Android (it was a Windows Mobile phone which is... old)
