SMS Text Messaging tools for blogs, web sites, and wordpress

I noticed on one of my web sites that I was getting some hits from google with “sms send” and “(keyword) to cell”. It occurred to me that people wanted to send my content to a cell phone, probably a friend. So I set out to find what SMS tools were available for web sites. Honestly I thought that there would be more out there than what I found. Someone with a really cool plugin could really dominate in this area. One of the things I should mention though (if you already don’t know), is that SMS Text messages can only hold 140 characters or less. So whatever you or your visitors are sending - it’s got to be less than that (a few quick sentences).

After doing some research, this is what I found…

Send a Text Message to a Cell Phone from another site

One possibility is to just send users to a site with a free form to send a text message to any cellular phone. Not the best solution I admit - but probably the easiest.

SMS Text Message from Your Blog

Here’s a solution that’s a little better, this site offers free SMS text message service by placing some code for a form on your blog. Text messages are sent for free through their servers. They also have a myspace widget for SMS as well, but I sure couldn’t find the code.

SMS Everywhere also has a cool free widget that you can put on your site; people can send messages from anywhere in the USA or Canada. They have 3 or 4 versions, and the cool thing is you can get one where your visitors can send a message to anyone by entering their cell phone number, or you can have it setup to send an SMS text to the webmaster. Nice!

Bands - SMS Alert your fans when your next gig is

If you have a band Broadtexter.com has a sweet little widget you can add to your site or myspace which will allow fans to signup - and get text messages via cell phone from you. You can send updates, or the next time and place you play - it’s a free service that will allow you to build up a fan club you can communicate with instantly at any time.

Wordpress Quick SMS Plugin

With Wordpress Quick SMS visitors to your blog can send you SMS text messages to your phone. Imagine getting comments live from your blog to your phone! This is a nice plugin - I only wish that instead of sending an SMS message to you that the users could send a text to any phone number they entered. If this plugin did that - it would be perfect!

Host Your own SMS Gateway on your web site or blog

You can always host your own form and send SMS messages directly from your site - you just need a script that can process the messages directly from your site. I thought that there would something available either open source or for free - but I sure couldn’t find anything out there at all.

I did find some scripts for sale for SMS sending at SMS Nexus, and the prices were very reasonable. The basic one was just $15 - and the code is completely editable, how can you beat that?

PHPMySMS has a script for sale that seems good, the price is not bad - but they advertise it as “open source”!? How can you charge money for something that’s OPEN SOURCE? Make no mistake about it - they’re not charging for support (that’s extra), and their code is “open”, BUT they surely don’t get the face that open source FREE.

Send Your SMS Messages through Google for FREE

My last solution is to send your SMS messages through the most reliable place online - Google! All the major IM services have a feature to allow you to send a text message to cell phone through the IM client. But, the google toolbar also has that feature. Whether or not you have the google toolbar installed - you can still go to this URL directly and send an SMS to a cell. Why is this cool? With just a little code, you could just popup a new window from a link with this right from your blog to send a message to anyone quickly. Now one of the cool things that I found with the google SMS service is that if your text isn’t less than 140 characters - when you send the message google will break it down into multiples texts for you. Not bad, I don’t think any of the other scripts or services do that.

Do you have other SMS text web tools that I haven’t listed here? SMS Scripts? SMS myspace or blog widgets? SMS Wordpress Plugins? Please comment now and share with everyone!