I was reading the paper today, and there was an article about sending SMS text messages to cell phones from your email account by using the number@provider.com method which I have been using for years.
It seemed stupid to me that there wasn’t some way just to use an IM client like Adium to send the messages to a phone, instead of sitting in front of your email client and hitting refresh to see if the other party responded (If possible).
So I looked around on the net and it appears that the Jabber project talked about building a bridge in July of 2001… and there is some discussion about this being a reality. The iPhone SMS is disguised as IM, my IM client should be able to send SMS to a phone that’s not on the Edge network.
Why isn’t this a common messaging style by now? Probably for the same reason that address book software didn’t use the modem in a computer to save you from having to dial the phone all the time.