Using Google and SMS Text Messaging as Lifehacks

You can say I'm late to the party on this one, but I know many of you aren't using SMS, or text messaging often, so I wanted to share this with you.

Two great life hacks for you to use with SMS:
1)  Google SMS:  I was running errands this Saturday and wanted to know what Nissan dealerships were close to me.  Why spend nearly $2 to have my cell phone company help out when I can use SMS?

• I typed in "Nissan Dallas TX" as the text
• sent the message to 46645 (or "googl" if you look at the keypad)
• immediately got a SMS message back with 2 area dealerships, how far away they were from me and their phone numbers

2)  I flew to Atlanta last week and wanted to remember where I parked my car (yes, I have roamed for an hour before because I was at the wrong terminal...). 

• I sent myself a SMS message with "B18 A" as the message.  Just kept it in my inbox to check when I returned home.

How are you using SMS?

UPDATE
In the words of Fletch, 'I'm such a heel'.  Much love to my bro Terry for helping me out via cell phone when I couldn't remember how to do the Google SMS this weekend.  Thanks for the Google tech support brotha!

_____
tags: sms | google | lifehacks

Comments

[Andreas]

Todd, You should visit Asia, really. The amount of SMS send in the whole region is mind boggling, to say the least.

Way ahead of the rest of the world. Even during the Tsunami, people were alerting others with SMS, or, way earlier, President Estrada in the Philippines was toppled due to the amount of SMS-ing and the smart mops that were organised via SMS. It is so frequent here, that countries, such as the Philippines shortly considered imposing a value added tax on SMS

[K. Todd Storch]

There's no doubt that the US is way behind Europe and WAY behind China/Japan/Phill's.

With the consolidation in the cell industry, there's an opportunity to get some standards to offer many more servcies. For example, Cingular has amazing incentives to get people off of the old network and on to the GSM/GPRS network.

The types of phones and options outside of the US has all of here very jealous!

Todd

[ScottM]

I forward some of my email to my phone. Usually don't get the whole message, but at least get an idea of what it's about. I also get schedule reminders from Yahoo! (though I have to work around Yahoo's lack of support for Virgin Mobile by sending to another address and forwarding to my phone) and breaking news alerts.

I send messages more rarely (Virgin Mobile charges 10 cents for outgoing messages, but incoming are free) and usually to email addresses rather than phones. I do use it occasionally to remote-post to my blog, though Blogger's post-by-email feature is so worthless that I usually get home before the post comes up (when the message doesn't get bounced, that is).

Unfortunately, Virgin Mobile doesn't support Google SMS, or vice versa, or something.

[K. Todd Storch]

Scott,

Great reminder on the forwarding of the email to cell phone. I do the same thing via Gmail and my Hotmail account (yuck, phooie, bla!).

Todd

[jim]

its really great i also did the same.

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