I finally bit the bullet last month and upgraded to an unlimited text messaging plan. It was hard to justify paying AT&T $20 per month at 7314% markup because I know organizations face the same dilemma when thinking about mobile communications. While creating a two-way messaging system pays off, getting started is often costly and time consuming.

Over the election season, we saw a big spike in text-messaging with political campaigns and GOTV efforts. The vast majority of these messages were outbound. Some basic information was collected, but many messages sent were nothing more than a short update or reminder. I think we still have a long way to go.

In areas of the world where internet access is sparse, text messaging is opening opportunities to barter, mobilize, and report information. The Nokia anthropologist, Jan Chipcase, travels most of the year studying the informal markets setup using cell phones, SIM cards, and SMS services. In Nepal, for example, local farm cooperatives can check vegetable market prices by sending a text to a short code.

And yesterday at Drupalcon, .Will White shared the scenario where text messaging could be used to collect election results in Africa. But there's one roadblock developers like Will are facing: the cost and burden of acquiring the SMS short code. Namely, those issues include:

1) Dedicated U.S. short codes cost thousands and take months to setup with each provider and regulatory commissions.. However, internationally, the situation looks much brighter and short code rentals are available for less than $150 per month.

2) Rental and short code aggregation services are available from Clickatell and VeriSign but may not be ideal for long-term usage.

3) The SMS network is not open like the internet and the carriers can still shut down access to the short code at any time.

4) Developer projects to bypass the shortcodes will likely face scaling problems (Gnokki, Sydewynder).

With all the bad news, I can report Drupal SMS Framework developers are working on a solution for our mobile-to-web innovations. I can't speak for billions of mobile users, but I think we can all benefit from improved SMS.