Thousands of RSS feeds are now available - including Slashdot headlines, CNN breaking news, travel alerts etc. etc. You could use these to configure a very personalised news service that texts you precisely those headlines that you need to know about (plus up to 120 characters of the article synopsis). How cool would it be to get a personalised alert within ten minutes of some information appearing on the Net? See Cover Pages and Findory Home for more about RSS. The incentive to mobile operators would be that they can charge the recipient for the text messages. Discounts for bulk, of course!
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I think that feeds are a good thing
I've done a lot of research on actually making this happen. It can be done, but the problem is that reliable and broadbase SMS costs money per message. So the question is, would you be willing to pay $0.10 per Text Message sent to your phone. And I'm not talking about what your cell-phone service provider charges you. I'm talking about sending each Text message from a new RSS item. If so, it can be done. What I concluded is that it would be better to use the email address of the phone to get the sending part for free, then you would only be charged through your cell phone service provider for each message. There are already sites that do this, so in short, you can get it now. If someone can think why it would be more valueable to go to text messaging directly from RSS, I'd be interested in hearing.
It's too expensive. Getting a data plan is way cheaper... just need a good browser that supports RSS. e.g. iPhone.