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Amazon has added SMS to its arsenal of notification types for its Simple Notification Service (SNS). Developers can use this with CloudWatch to send texts when CloudWatch sounds an alarm, or they can create applications that push information to users independently of CloudWatch.

Amazon has had SNS for some time, and has supported notifications through email, JSON, Amazon SQS, and HTTP/S.

After reading both our recent guest post by Bernard Moon, "The Coming Ubiquity of Video Communications", and the resulting comments, I saw that many people were divided on this possibility. Despite the writer's surety of video's eventual win, many of you were just as assured that text would always be a large part of mobile messaging and communication.

We asked you this question earlier today and we culled your responses from Facebook, the original post and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Twilio announced at its first-ever developers' conference in San Francisco this morning a new product called Twilio Connect that will help app developers provide messaging and call functions within apps while also helping them monetize their efforts. Twilio takes care of the billing of the end user of an app for any phone calls and SMS allowing developers to price their products using software-as-a-service model.

It is an interesting concept for developers looking to add communication functionality to their apps while also getting paid. App monetization is one of the largest problems facing developers currently and Twilio takes that to heart. In that regard, Twilio is also teaming up with venture capitalist Dave McClure and super angel Ron Conway to set up a seed fund to developers using Twilio Connect.

Twitter just announced that users can now post photos by attaching them to simple SMS messages. The feature is available on many popular carriers, and the post says they're working to bring on more.

SMS has always been an important part of Twitter's platform, especially in places with low smartphone penetration. It's possible to follow, tweet and view account info using only SMS. Adding photo sharing via SMS lets mobile-only users in on another part of the full Twitter experience.

Another company in the very crowded but very popular messaging space, HeyWire is launching a Facebook app today that will allow users to send both texts and tweets from within Facebook.

Like other text-messaging services, HeyWire gives you a real phone number to use in order to send and receive text messages. Messages that are sent also sync with the company's iOS and Android apps, so you can read and respond via multiple devices.

Google has extended its Gmail SMS chat functionality to three more African countries: Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi.

Gmail SMS allows anyone worldwide to communicate with fellow Gtalk chat users even when they're away from their computer. This year, Google added the extension to Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Zambia.

Sticking a stamp to the front of an envelope could become so last century, if a logical plan in Europe ends up spreading as far as it could. Danish letter mailers, beginning April 1st, will be able to send an SMS to that nation's Postal Service and receive a short code back, confirming that they have paid to mail a letter. They'll write that code on the envelope and then the post office machines will scan that, instead of a stamp. Sweden says it's working on a similar system.

It makes a lot of sense, presuming of course that people continue to mail letters on paper at all. It's also a little sad. Of course such news likely represents just one more move towards the eventual collapse of many different types of transactions into an act of mobile e-commerce based on a strong relationship between a phone owner, their mobile carrier and a third party in any type of transaction.

The self-destructing message, whether a piece of paper that mystically disintegrates at the appropriate moment or the microfiche that goes up in a poof of smoke, is a staple of any spy movie and a childhood wish of my own. TigerText, a private SMS app, has made my childhood dream a reality.

The company, which has had a free app available, has brought this spy-novel feature to the enterprise with this week's release of an enterprise app.

At a conference of more than 130,000 people, cell phone service, Internet connectivity and even the sureness that a taxi will be available when you need it is generally in question. Trying to coordinate between multiple people, therefore, can be a rather trying experience...unless you have one little group messaging app called Beluga.

Last week, amidst the insanity that is the Consumer Electronics Show (and Las Vegas on an average Thursday night) Beluga saved me and my friends from an unending and confusing game of telephone.

"Technology is the equalizer," Fareed Zein told Fast Company. Zein has built the Sudan Vote Monitor as a platform people can use to monitor and cover next month's independence vote in that northeastern African country.

To the south and east, another technological experiment has risen, that one to commemorate the fait accompli of the Rwandan genocide. The Genocide Archive of Rwanda, hosted by the Kigali Genocide Memorial, will document the 100 days and 800,000 lives lost in the brutality of 1994.