# SMS apps, organized!

Written By:

William Carter  
Reviewed By:

Elizabeth Thorn

Recently there have been a number of services launched that primarily use an SMS interface.  I personally love checking these things out because they are typically easy to set up, and the text-only interface is very low overhead.  Product Hunt hosts a couple of decent collections of the more up-and-coming text-based apps.

I started using one of my Burner numbers to sign up for these services because I didn't really want to give my personal number out, but I found that by having my Burner linked, there was a cool side effect: all the new apps were put in one place, clearly separated from my increasingly messy Messages app.

Here are a couple of the services I've been using with my SMS Apps Burner:

**Digit**.  Digit is kinda this financial service thing that will automatically take money from a linked checking account and save it in a Digit account.  The idea here is to use a non-human thing (algorithm) to track how much you've been spending and earning, and dynamically transfer a sensible amount of cash into your human savings account so you can spend it later on something like a pair of skis, or your debilitating student loans.  Digit sends me a text message every day to my Burner number with my current checking balance and how much it's transferring to my savings.  Easy!  I can send the service commands like "Recent" to see recent transactions on my checking account, or "Withdraw" to transfer money back from my savings to checking.  Yes!

**Sensay**.  This is a new Los Angeles (!!!) based service that just recently launched.  It works a lot like the old Instant Messaging bot Aardvark.  In fact, it's exactly the same, but uses SMS instead of AOL or whatever.  I text Sensay with a question using my Burner, then the service sends the question out to another member of the Sensay community for a quick answer.  The answer comes back to Burner in a separate thread, so I can talk to the complete stranger on the other end with follow up questions or what they think of the Dodgers' pitching rotation.

**GoButler**.  Similar to Magic.  Much of the time I’m looking to buy craft beer, because I live in a hipster-friendly neighborhood of Los Angeles and I’m playing to type.  Even though I already know what the best beer store is, I wanted to test this service out by asking, via sms, what the best place to buy beer in LA was.  GoButler responded within a few seconds with a place called Remedy Liquor.  Being untrusting of _Algorithms_ in general, I did some research into GoButler’s recommendation, and it seems _totally wrong_ but hey, B+ for effort.

With so many texting-based apps out there, having the ability to partition these services in Burner is a pretty cool hack.  Most of the apps mask the phone number you are texting from, so from a privacy perspective, Burner isn’t the key value-add here (unless you believe these services are collecting the information, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt).  However, the ability to manage a Sensay thread outside of my messages app, for instance, is rad.  I’m increasingly wanting to keep my personal stuff in a tidy little place, protected from all the outside noise, and it’s a lot more fun to manage a conversation with a complete stranger in a separate place.  There’s also something cool about rolling these services up in one place and creating a little wrapper around each that makes them more compelling than they might be on their own.

## Ready to start calling & texting with a shiny new number?