There's nothing fundamentally limiting SMS to being stuck to that. That SMS didn't add better 1:something capabilities is an indictment of post-1995 cellular carrier pricing models and greed.
They could have prevented and owned the entire messaging space, all of which is essentially an attempt to recreate basic messaging functionality that SMS lacks.
On the search side, there's nothing stopping a carrier from indexing public SMSs and making them discoverable. We're not talking about rocket science, in the basic realization [0].
I'm not sure why HN is looking at these things like (short blobs of text) are completely different than (short blobs of text). Everything built around them is plumbing. Complicated, difficult plumbing, but plumbing nonetheless.
I'm all ears as to why providing an SMS service that supports all of Twitter's features would have been technically impossible... say, circa-2000.
The way you are looking at things, the iphone isn't really an upgrade over the blackberry or palm pilot.
I think we're in agreement while disagreeing. My fascination isn't so much that the phone companies couldn't do it (because they could), but that they didn't (because they couldn't even imagine it).
Props to Twitter for envisioning the product, but "What if?" phone companies had {Twitter, Facebook} is an entirely plausible, albeit organizationally-unlikely present.
It would have required them to pivot their thinking from maximally taxing use of capital-intensive investments to growing scalable platforms, but stranger things have happened. And the internet's growth was already obvious in that time frame.