Imagine two still not so unusual situations:
- Your friend on Small.World has our mobile app open and wants to contact you but has no Internet access for the time being. You may be in the same position.
- Your friend has the app open but no Internet access. They want to know where you are at the moment. Luckily, you do have web connection and they have offline maps. But again, what about your exact location they need to know right now?
Well, Small.World has a solution for such cases: the good old Short Message Service (SMS) protocol. Sending text messages is built in Small.World (subject to network provider fees) so you don’t have to leave our app, go to your phonebook and find the right person in order to send a text. You just send straight from our app.Below we show how it works from the technical viewpoint:
SMS can also be used to share your location with someone who’s offline at the moment. In Small.World you can choose an option to share your location via text. This will send an SMS with geocoordinates to your friend. And those long decimal numbers will be automatically converted by Small.World into a map location.
References
- Brown, J., Shipman, B. & Vetter, R., 2007. SMS: The Short Message Service. Computer, 40(12).
- Jensen, K., 2011. How to Send Text Messages with PHP. Envato Pty Ltd. Available at: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-send-text-messages-with-php–net-17693 [Accessed April 27, 2015].