Menuism.com Builds Simple Send-To-Phone Feature in Hours with Twilio

September 20, 2010
Written by
Danielle Morrill
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

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Justin Chen dropped us a note, letting us know his company built a simple “send to phone” feature into their restaurant listings in just a couple hours.

Menuism.com, which has over 500K visitors each month according to Compete.com, is a personal dining guide where you can find restaurants and share your favorites with your foodie friends.

 

How Did You Hear About Twilio

We heard about Twilio through the standard tech news channels (i.e. TechCrunch), but after hearing some stories from people on Hacker News about how easy it was to build for we figured we should give it a try at some point.

 

How did you approach building the send to phone feature of Menuism?

We were exploring options for a “send to phone” option when we remembered how easy people said it was to build phone apps using Twilio. We looked at a few ruby gems and some sample code on github and decided that it seemed too easy not to try (we settled on the twilio gem by webficient: http://github.com/webficient/twilio). A couple days later, I was scheduled for jury duty so I actually built the first version during the first few hours in the jury summons room. By the end of jury duty, Menuism TxtBot was born and sending live text messages to diners going to restaurants.

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