I know that sending an SMS from my phone to another phone costs Orange almost nothing. Orange to another network probably doesn’t touch a foreign mast (I expect that data is just sent via Internet, a much cheaper way, and it keeps load of the masts) during the network transmission (it obviously uses a mast from the receiver’s network to their phone though). Meanwhile, a lot of businesses would really love a free-to-cheap API for sending messages. Twitter and Google would definitely be up for that, being as they had to make individual deals so far with whoever they’re working with. There’s two massive customers already.

There’s a weird myth about each phone having an email address associated with it for text messages, but I’ve never got that working.

There actually is a way to receive messages, and send messages to a group of users. I use it to get a message whenever a customer emails me. It just takes a little messing around with Twitter. But it shouldn’t have to be that awkward.