Yet another terrible assassination piece by Johnny Diggz, the CEO of Tropo, a quickly failing Twilio competitor. He has been a real dick since the early days and spreads lies and rumors about Twilio.
Hello,<p>So I have a slightly different take on this. (Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for 2600hz).<p>I've always thought Twilio was trying to get acquired (their deals with AT&T and Microsoft seemed to imply a conversation was happening in this regard at the very least) but for a valuation north of $1B. My personal feeling is that you can't get a $1B valuation without Mobile and Twilio doesn't really do mobile in the same way 2600hz doesn't really do mobile (at least not yet).<p>The walled Garden that is Carrier-land prevents native dialing (dialing through the handset dialer instead of a native app/web app/plugin). Becoming an MVNO is super risky, but I was really encouraged by Twilio's announcement with AT&T and even more so by Voxeo's announcement with Deutsche.<p>This is a big world and the clear winner of the voice API war will be crowned in the mid 20-teen's not now. If your argument is that Twilio will burn out before their acquired, my reply is: Maybe. That's the risk they took, and it's similar to the risk Square took (see this leaked chart: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/b1Sm9.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/b1Sm9.png</a>).<p>I admire Twilio because they're the best developer evangelism team I've ever seen. Yes they spend a ton on marketing and they might be the Groupon of Voice APIs, but the fact is that they're doing it, and if they get acquired all of the Voice API companies will benefit from their success.<p>In short, Twilio doing well actually benefits Voxeo and so I don't understand the worst girlfriend analogy. I'm by no means in love with Twilio, but you have to admire them for what they do: they're hands-down the best evangelists for any platform out there. Their developer engagement is nothing short of awesome.<p>Cheers,<p>Joshua
Still waiting to find the connection in the article about how Twilio is like the worst girlfriend you've ever had. Just seems like a jaded bias article from a competitor. :-/
Cached version at <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.diggz.org/index.php/2012/10/16/twilio-is-like-the-worst-girlfriend/&strip=1" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.di...</a>
"Twiliots" Really?<p>Voxeo Prophecy is really nice (except for configuration which can be a bit of a quagmire) and their service is good but Twilio is very, very easy to use. This piece reminds me that I need to look at Twilio for more than SMS.
Interesting (if painful) space. I've played with the Twilio API and for what we wanted (SMS to any phone, ability to dial/talk to a phone and take a response) it seems to be fine.<p>That my 'phone' service doesn't offer this as part of the package is what I find actually broken. For years and years the answer the question "How can I use my phone?" was "Pick it up, dial, talk." which was fine when it was a person to person communication device. But when it become a 'computer to person' communication device it needed a computer friendly API. Had the phone companies provided that, folks like Voxeo and Twilio and eFax wouldn't exist.
I friggin hate Twilio, and I kick myself for ever getting suckered into using it. I'm down to a single account and a single line in, but I need to port it off, and Google doesn't care to port Twilio numbers off to GV. If Twilio could do something other than drop calls to PSTN (I mean here, make a fuggin VoIP call), I'd be singing a totally different song, but it's a one-trick pony.
I'm looking at Twillio for a possible future project and this just prompted me to look at Voxeo which I hadn't heard of. The Voxeo website just doesn't work for me like the Twilio one does, it lacks an pricing information (that I could find quickly) and even the developer section is mostly buzzword filled non-information. The Twilio site gives you pricing information up front and the developer pages show you the APIs and give some examples so that you can really see what can be done with it.<p>This doesn't necessarily mean that Twilio will survive or not have to raise prices but they make me want to use it more than Voxeo even if it has the same capabilities.<p>I really do hate sites that hide the pricing and documentation or require registration to get them although maybe A-B testing shows that gives better results.
The gist of the post is that Twilio is losing money, losing talent, and getting desperate. I don't see why the author couldn't have just said that instead of picking a sexist blog post title -- he didn't even use the girlfriend metaphor beyond the headline.<p>Edit: They've changed the title. Cool!
I really want to like twilio but it's MADNESS that you can't terminate calls over the internet. So you're saying EVERYONE in the company has to have skype numbers just so we can terminate calls?! I would love it if twilio client actually worked but the sound quality makes it worthless. Hopefully WebRTC will fix that but who knows how many more years that will be. Please please, just bite the bullet and build a desktop app that has decent sound quality, supports multiple accounts and can punch through firewalls. It's stunning to me that Google Voice, Skype, and Twilio are so poor at serving business customers.
While I don't 100% agree with the piece, our team just stopped using Twilio and is migrating over to MoGreet beacuse of their MMS capabilities. We already miss Twilio's strong community, but MoGreet has been incredibly responsive and supportive.