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Hmm, so Phono is free and open source. It sounds like I'll have to do a lot more than sign up for Twilio, give them my CC#, and drop four lines of JS into my app.

Twilio is frequently aggressive with describing how much work integration is. Literally, yeah, you can ring a phone in one line of code but you really don't want to. It starts getting powerful when you can push full features - tested, with UI/UX, production-ready - in about a day, and you could write a telephony business in about a month, from scratch. Those aren't exaggerations in the slightest.

See my upcoming free guide on productizing Twilio apps for why using the sample code in a live environmwnt is almost always a vewwwwwwy bad idea.

Well now I'm curious. Just this weekend I had a great time texting myself with the official Python and Ruby libs from Twilio in only a few lines [1].

Sure there were rough edges like "which and how many phone numbers do I have access to" and "am I going to run out of credits and cost myself a jillion dollars accidentally" but on the whole it was a great starting experience.

Edit: I'm guessing you mean I need to build my own TwiML wrappers and scripts so that my customers can have a meaningful interaction with the computer rather than simply getting called by a useless one-line proof of concept that can't talk or listen to them?

[1] https://gist.github.com/1102938

Wait for the whole story later, but in general: what happens in terms of user experience if you input a wrong number? What happens if you input someone else's number? What happens if 4chan discovers your site and uses it to input a particular someone else's number 8,000 times? etc, etc

At least for the texting side of things, it's downright trivial. My fuzzer texts me every time it finds a crash, and it takes all of 3 lines of code to do this. Works like a dream.

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