<rant>
Since our discussions, things have predictably settled. It was never
the intention that this mailing list becomes a 'chat' forum - there
are plenty of other places for that. Instead, it's a way for us to
have a central node as a community to collaborate on. I'm quite proud
of what's become of it.

One new initiate has been born - the distributed database - which
several silicon beacher's having picked this up and are experimenting
with now. It's going to be interesting to see what we can cook up for
release later this year.
</rant>

But I've now got a new proposal. Building on some thoughts I tweeted
before[1], I have a solution that will do three separate things that
will help our industry.

Background
Twitter has become the most important social networking site for the
Australia tech community. It facilitates meet ups, keeps people up to
date, breaks news, and generally builds community.

Today - news was announced that twitter would be shutting off its SMS
service for international numbers because they now long can
sustain[2] . This leaves Australian users completely out in the cold
on one of the most valuable features of the technology. Separately,
the micro-blogging revolution that Twitter has created is going to
create transformative impacts on the industry. The embrace of Plurk
and Identi.ca by Australia's twitter community to name but two
examples, of how things are happening. However what these open source
solutions lack is an SMS solution.

The idea
What I propose, is that as a community, we create a SMS solution that
brings back Twitter to the phone for us as well as supporting other
twitter clones.

SMS gateways, including an Australian startup in Sydney, allow you to
set up premium SMS plans. So for example, if people subscribe to your
plan - it will cost you 55 cents. However, as the organiser of that
plan, you get 18 cents for every message you get. It's an innovative
revenue model, which I have explored in the past as part of my
research into the mobile web opportunity.

If we can hack together something that links the twitter API and a SMS
gateway API like that of Ivo Brett's startup[2], we can restore SMS
functionality. Oh, and make a bit of money.

Sure, this is a market opportunity for a entrepreneur. I reckon you
could make a quick buck, until a phone company or Twitter wakes up.
But personally, I think it's too small scale an idea to launch a
business, but too big an opportunity to pass up.

So by building this service, as Silicon Beach - we've now got a
revenue stream...for the comunity. The revenue raised, will be 100%
reinvested into the community. Sponsoring conferences, meetups - heck
wherever there is value to support effort in the community.

Twitter becomes useful + we make opensource microblogging useful + we
fund our community without realising it. Three bigs things, and all it
takes is a bit of API hackery as some Jelly-a-thon.

Thoughts?

[1] http://twitter.com/liako/statuses/887005932
[2] http://blog.twitter.com/2008/08/changes-for-some-sms-usersgood-and-ba...
[3] http://www.me2mobile.com