What is it?
Txtbux.co.uk let's you comparison shop between real life bookshops, and Amazon on the web. Users text (SMS) the ISBN of a book they're interested in to a special number; it then checked on the web, and sent a message back with the price - and sent an e-mail to the user with a link to buy from Amazon.
What's the story
I
built the site in around 2002/3 as a bit of an experiment to see how a
web service could be used on mobiles. At the time, the only way of
accessing data services from a mobile was WAP, which didn't work on
most phones and was incredibly slow and nasty to use. I wanted to try
using SMS as the interface - at the time this was pretty unique (I got
a full page article about it in Cre@te Online - at the time, one of the
biggest magazines for web professionals). It pre-dated Amazon making
their data available through an API, so whenever someone texted in, it
would screen-scrape the Amazon website to find the info it needed, and
shrunk it all down into the 160 characters you can fit in an SMS reply.
I
actually thought it would have a fairly short life as a service, as I
was convinced that phones would fairly soon be easily data-enabled, and
people would access this kind of info through a mobile web browser.
Even though this is now starting to become reality, the site still has
a core of regular users who like the convenience, speed and simplicity
of just sending and receiving a text. And people use it not just for
checking prices, but to 'bookmark' what they've been browsing as
something to come back to later.