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I've seen something like this used to get live feedback from an audience during a speech or demo. It's pretty nice for leveling the playing field for introverts. Of course, it's easy for one person to kill it with spam.

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Yeah! We used to use something like that at a place I worked. I think the audience being live put some social pressure against spam. It worked out well for us, especially for big meetings where even the more outgoing folks might have felt uncomfortable putting their hand up and waiting for a microphone.

If anyone wants to do something like this, I recall the folks that did it used this really simple thing from Anveo that just posts SMS messages to a url: http://www.anveo.com/api.asp?code=apihelp_sms_receive_http&a...

It's not really an API...more of a webhook, but it was really quick and easy to tie to a simple web app, and relatively cheap (~$8/month for a DID number and plan).

Twitter?

SMS was just easier to use to allow for anonymous comments and questions...the web app didn't post what number the comments/questions came from, didn't require any registration, easier to share a phone number to text than a url to enter, etc.

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