A few weeks ago I was evaluating phone integration options for a public art infrastructure gig when I ran across Twilio, a service for interactive telephone applications driven by your web app. They handle the phone esoterica and connect to your web API to determine what to say, when to request keypad input, and other such telephonic interactions.
I'm impressed with how they've greased the skids for new developers, and in about 10 minutes I had a Hello World phone app talking with my django based system. (Well, I called it "Talk Nerdy to Me" but let's pretend it was Hello World) It's clear that the Twilio team is in tune with what makes developers happy, because the docs and code examples made everything easy (like Sunday morning, not like Staples).
Then the other night I noticed that Twilio are giving away a netbook per week to people using their system, so I took a couple of hours to whip up a call-in system to record audio then tweet a link to said recording. I deployed the code to my EC2 cluster, pushed the code to github for public consumption, then submitted it to Twilio and called it a night.
A few days later, one of the Twilio developer evangelists pointed out that they have a new audio-to-text transcription service so like a crow drawn to a shiny bit of foil I added a transcription field to the models (thanks South!), added a new callback view in Django, and voila, twilleetio also tweets a bit of the transcription.
So with very little fuss I made a fun Twilio + Twitter + Django mashup and you can see the tweets at @twilleetio.
Hacking together these services with Django was neat, so it was a bonus to learn that the Twilio team dug my app and they're going to send this week's netbook my way.
