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Is anyone home for the text message revolution?

During this morning's scanning tech news, I stumbled across a strange AP News story on Wired's site announcing "a new service that lets shoppers compare prices and buy things with a few quick taps on their cell phones." In other words: text.
Written by Andrew Nusca, Contributor
Mobile phoneDuring this morning's scanning tech news, I stumbled across a strange AP News story on Wired's site announcing "a new service that lets shoppers compare prices and buy things with a few quick taps on their cell phones." In other words: text. And I couldn't help but think: does anyone really use this kind of technology?

The service is called Amazon TextBuyIt, and it lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 ("Amazon" on the keypad) from basically anywhere. But with the growing popularity of phones that can access the Web -- Blackberrys and iPhones and almost all of them these days -- is this kind of technology a moot point?

According to the AP wire story:

New TextBuyIt customers will be prompted to enter the e-mail address associated with their existing Amazon account plus a shipping zip code. The service then calls them and walks through the checkout process using an automated voice system. Shoppers get confirmation by text message and e-mail.

From there, the customers can check on order status on Amazon's Web site.

So, even with this text message ability, there's still a reliance on Amazon's traditional Web interface. To boot, the whole thing seems kind of involved -- and from what I understand from the above, you can't check your status via a text -- which is probably the most important service of all. Who wouldn't love to subtly text Amazon in the middle of a meeting to see what state that I Am Legend DVD is in?

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