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0 pointstrevelyan16y ago0 comments

Do you normally send people ideas you hope they won't implement?

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4 comments · 1 top-level

gkoberger16y ago· 3 in thread

I was a really early Twilio adopter, and was having issues with it (since it wasn't nearly as good as it is now). I emailed her a support question, and she asked me what I was doing:

"I'd be interested to talk with your more about what you're looking to do with sendDigits/DTMF tones on incoming calls, this might be something we should consider adding in the future."

So, I outlined my entire system to her. I have no problem with someone using my idea- however, she was answering a private support issue that I (a paying customer) had, and I was helping her by providing her with more information about what I was doing with her system.

Then, she posted it on her blog without crediting me. Implementing the idea isn't bad; posting a private support thread as your own idea on your own blog, however, is.

danielle1716y ago

I'm sorry I had no idea I was ripping you off, I appreciate that you're a Twilio early adopter. Like you mentioned, I handle customer support for Twilio and hear about countless ideas, feature requests, etc. everyday. There's no way I could remember who came up with what, and multiple people run similar ideas by me all the time.

I built this to scratch my own itch and its also a really simple use case to illustrate the ability to control real world devices with DTMF tones. Some Twilio projects I had in mind when I built this include Buzzeromatic.com, which is also powered by Twilio and costs $1.95/month and had a very public launch. Sunlight Labs also did a door hack with Twilio and an arduino that I thought was pretty sweet.

What I think is important is that what I've built doesn't have any UI or anything like that, just a really stripped down version and I'm not looking to make it into some paid service. You could certainly take these guts and turn them into a kickass product, but these <100 lines of PHP are not the defensible secret sauce.

The ability to use DTMF tones with Twilio has been around for awhile, I got the tone generator from a Get Satisfction thread that's about a year old: http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/dtmf_tone_generatio...

gkoberger16y ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to pick a fight, I just knew we talked about the exact same implementation a long time ago :)

Keep up the great work with Twilio- I use it on as many of my projects (such as http://getdoorman.com, my commercial door buzzer app and http://pleasecallmyphone.com) as I can.

gduffy16y ago

This idea is too obvious to stake any sort of claim. And once you've decided to do it, there aren't many variations on the theme.

Basically anyone who has programmed with VoIP and has a callbox has thought about or done this. E.g., I did this years ago using a VoIP server that I wrote -- silly prompt sounds and all.

Furthermore, companies like Twilio are seldom surprised by applications of their platform; they likely had to come up with tons of examples for investors when they raised money.

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