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.

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.

Last month, Twitter added automated galleries for a user's last 100 tweeted photos, visible from the Web view, which display shared photos more prominently and help provide a quick sense of a user's view of the world.

How do you use Twitter on your mobile device?

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.

There is no per-message charge, but it does cost 20 Facebook Credits per month to hook you up with a U.S. phone number and that unlimited texting access to any mobile phone in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and China and to most phones in the Caribbean and Central and South America. (The iPhone and Android apps are free, but are ad-supported).

While 20 Facebook Credits per month isn't a huge fee, it may be a big hurdle for some people to overcome in order to use this service. After all, if you're on Facebook, you might just chat with people using Facebook Messaging rather than sending an SMS. Of course, there are a few folks who still aren't on Facebook.

HeyWire recently partnered with Twitter to launch HeyTweet, a service that lets users send tweets for free via SMS. That service seems a lot more practical than this Facebook app.

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.

Gmail users can send and receive SMS messages for free using the service. (Non-Gmail users can SMS for regular text charges.)

Divon Lan, Google product manager for sub-Saharan Africa, wrote on the Google Africa Blog that the mobile carriers that provide the service include MTN, Uganda Telecom and Orange in Uganda, Vodacom in Tanzania and Airtel and TNM in Malawi.

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.

On the Loss of Stamps

According to Wikipedia, adhesive stamps are only about 170 years old. (The first one, the UK's Penny Black, is pictured above.) Hardly something to get too misty-eyed about, right?

So stamps came on the scene out of clear need. They probably aren't needed anymore, though.

Might they be worth keeping anyway, just for the art of them? Some countries around the world are experimenting with stamps turned into QR codes for Augmented Reality. That's cool but I wouldn't put my money on QR/AR postal stamps sticking around.

It seems unlikely to me that in ten or twenty more years, functional postal stamps will still be printed in large quantity at all. SMS as a replacement just makes too much sense. Build that collection while it's still cheap, I suppose. I like stamps and am a little saddened by the prospect of their obsolescence.

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.

As we reported last year, TigerText's mobile apps allows users to send text messages or photos that can then be deleted off both the sender's and receiver's phone after a selected period of time. Once a sender selects the message lifespan (from 1 minute up to 30 days), expired messages are not only deleted from both phones, but are not stored on any server and they cannot be retrieved once expired. Users can also select a "Delete on Read" option, which will delete the text 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message.

The latest version of the app caters to businesses by allowing users to perform a one-time login to authenticate with the company. TigerText describes the app as "a cross-platform collaboration tool for your organization that allows you to deploy your own private, secure mobile network where your employees can safely communicate on their existing mobile devices within your company."

"Text messaging, just like email, can be used against your organization," writes the company on its website. "If the messages no longer exist, there is no risk of data breach or exposure."

The app is available on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms and administrators can manage user settings from the Web. It enters an increasingly crowded space, with apps like Kik, Beluga and GroupMe entering the free message game, but this one has that special spin for the security-minded.

From what we can tell, however, the app is missing one huge feature - the little whisp of smoke, wafting out the crack of your phone case whenever a message is deleted.

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.

Beluga joins into a crowded space of SMS alternatives, but takes it one step further by giving its users the ability to create "pods" of interaction and adding extremely useful features like geolocation of a individual pod members and picture sharing. If you're all actively chatting and choosing to share your location (notice: you have the option to turn this off or on at any point), then you can switch over to the map view at any point to see where everyone is. This is a great feature for exploring a new place with friends, yet being able to run off on your own and still find each other.

Last year, all the conversation leading up to the South By Southwest conference - one of the largest yearly convergences of smartphone-owning geeks - was dominated by the battle between location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. This year, we expect that same conversation, but this time focused on group messaging apps. There are a couple of strong competitors (such as GroupMe), but if our experience with Beluga at CES tells us anything, our vote lies with the whale.

We know, there's likely a bunch more that do the same thing slightly differently. You tell us - what's your favorite group messaging app, so far?

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.

Genocide Archive of Rwanda

Today, the Genocide Archive of Rwanda opened at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in that country. A technologically sophisticated collection of the facts and nightmares of that ethnic butchery, the GAR will make the murder of 85% of the Tutsi population the most documented instance of inhumanity in history.

The archive contains video, audio, photos, maps, documents and publications. They can be accessed via a number of different criteria or searched by keyword. (And do be warned. This shit is rugged to look at.) The most important materials are the records of the "gacaca" trials - the "peace and reconciliation" type confrontations of the perpetrators by the victims and the victims' families.

Although it looks like a large sampling of the materials are available online already, the complete archive is accessible on-site only, at the memorial building near which so many victims of the violence are buried. However, all of the materials will eventually be online and available to all.

Sudan Vote Monitor

Built on the Ushahidi platform, the Sudan Vote Monitor is a website to which witnesses can post updates via mobile.

"This technology could be particularly useful in Sudan where long distances and inadequate infrastructure pose a significant challenge. The spread of mobile communications throughout Sudan in recent years offers a unique and feasible opportunity to overcome this challenge. The proposed technology is the closest thing to a real-time observation of what is happening in an election center in a remote part of Sudan."

The SVM was built by Zein, an oil and gas man in Texas who was born in Sudan. In conjunction with his sister, a college professor, he runs the Sudan Institute for Research and Policy. The ability to help monitor the upcoming elections with the use of simple SMS messages may help keep the process honest and violence-free. At least it will document any deviations from that ideal.

Read about the use of mobile and web technologies during the last Kenyan election, the employment of e-readers in Ghana, the use of mapping tech to get inhabitants more services and other ReadWriteWeb coverage of Africa tech.

Other sources: Guardian

Not only is this app massively popular for a reason, but that same reason may be why you won't see it in the app store soon and time might be running out to grab a copy.

Kik  is simply a real-time messaging service that allows users of iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones to communicate with each other. Kik can act as an SMS replacement, with the user on the other end getting a Push notification when you message them, or as a real-time chat. When chatting with someone, Kik shows a message saying when they're typing and a little icon next to each of your messages shows when it has been read. Inviting your friends is as easy as tweeting a link on Twitter, sending them an SMS invite or shooting them a quick email. It's part of this fast friend-finding, however, that might get Kik into a little bit of hot water with Apple.

According to an article by Alexia Tsotsis on TechCrunch, the app may be in direct violation of Apple's TOS by automatically importing your contacts without asking permission. Tsotsis writes that Kik founder Ted Livingston "was baffled as to why the app had been accepted into the App Store four times without contest if it in fact was in violation of Apple's TOS".

Kik May Become the Ultimate Sling Box

Kik also mentioned it would soon be adding three new features to the app - the ability to block contacts, picture messaging and a third feature they call "Sneaky Rhino". According to the blog post, this feature "will take Kik, and using an incredibly powerful technology we have developed over the last 16 months, wirelessly connect your smartphone to any PC or TV". In an interview with Venture Beat's Matt Marshall last week, Livingston showed off a bit of this upcoming functionality.

[Livingston] was able to remotely take over the Chrome browser (with my permission, of course) on my MacBook. He then played music over it -- all while remotely operating this from his phone. All I did was enter a code that he gave me so that my browser knew to pair with the phone and allow the stream. (A QR code can be used, too.) [...] It's pretty cool. Basically, Kik's technology lets you wirelessly "sling" any content on your phone to any device running on any software.  This hasn't been done before, as far as I know. Sure, AppleTV lets you stream iTunes content to the TV, but it's a closed garden. You can't run Apple content on other devices. Kik's technology allows you to stream pretty much any content on any device with a browser, whether it's a basic PC, or even a PS3, Wii or a Windows Media Center device.

For the time being, it looks like the app is still available and we say jump on that bandwagon before it leaves town...and cancel that expensive $15 a month SMS plan because you soon won't need it. Sure, Kik isn't alone in the SMS-replacement market, with apps like GroupMe, TextPlus or PingChat, but it is alone in being completely free, fast, multi-platform and growing in popularity by leaps and bounds.

Arguably this means there's lots of opportunity for innovative services to be built around SMS. And one such startup is TextSlide, a new text-only service that brings together two random people to chat anonymously. It sounds a lot like Chatroulette, with the ability to communicate with strangers and "Next!" someone and move on to another correspondent.

TextSlide feels somehow "safer," however, than Chatroulette - such is the difference between displaying only written words in the former versus your face (ha) in the latter. Only your area code is displayed in TextSlide - your phone number never is. And while you can set a username for yourself, you can change this at anytime.

TextSlide creator Matt Hunter says he's interested in cultivating a community via text-messaging and plans to be able to reward good behavior (or good conversationalists perhaps) and "punish" others. Game mechanics like this, says Hunter, will help make the chatting experience better and may also be used to match people.

And while the service could certain be adopted by those legions of teenage texters and become just another place to start off conversations with age/sex/location inquiries (when I tried the service, the conversations tended to go that direction sooner rather than later). But depending on the person you connect with, there are lots of possibilities for the kinds of conversations and connections that can be made.

Building New Communications Tools

TextSlide is pretty simple and streamlined. But Hunter has other things planned for TextSlide, a project that he built over one weekend using the Twilio API. And as Twilio is powering a number of interesting services, including GroupMe and I Can't Find My Phone. And it may be that Twilio's support for its developers will help encourage more startups, like TextSlide, to build more innovative texting tools.

TextSlide is still in beta, but you can sign up via the website. Hunter is slowing letting new users in, as he monitors the service's usage.

If you're either a power WordPress user, a security-conscious blogger or simply a control freak, then the new SMS features offered by WordPress are going to be right up your alley.

From alerting you to changes on your blog to allowing you to remotely approve post comments, the feature will help WordPress administrators keep things on their blogs on a short leash.

Free features will include receiving notifications when users are added or removed, your blog theme changes or privacy settings change. For $20 a year, WordPress is offering a few more advanced features.

First, you can protect your blog by having it send a text message containing a code whenever you want to log in to the administrative Dashboard. This code will then be required to log in.

More interesting, to us at least, are the more advanced notifications, which can tell you whenever a new post is published to your blog or notifications of new comments. With the new comments, you can reply by text to approve or deny them and even respond to them. And SMS is no longer just for Twitter, as you can shoot off a quick text message to post directly to your blog.

The addition sounds like a great one, especially for keeping control when you're out of 3G range.

To create GeoSMS and the accompanying app, he took the recently ratified geo: URI standard, which helps identify geographic locations, and put it into SMS. The method basically involves embedding one or more geo URIs in the body of an SMS text message, separated from the message text by one or more spaces, explains the GeoSMS website.

A message containing such an URI is known as a "geotaged" SMS. For example:

I'm at the pub geo:-37.801631,144.980294.

Kwan says that text messages saying "Where are you?" are the most commonly sent SMS, but the technology itself isn't currently capable of identifying where someone is located. GeoSMS changes that.

GeoSMS' Future

Kwan would like to see GeoSMS implemented into new phones and other commercial applications in the future. "The software is available for free through the Android Market, published by RMIT. Its source code can be found online," he said.

"GeoSMS is an open standard, so hopefully handset manufacturers will build it into their phones in future. In the meantime, there's nothing to stop someone developing a commercial version for the iPhone or Nokia. In fact, we'd encourage it."

"I Am Here" Android App

To demonstrate how the technology works, an open-source Android application called "I Am Here" has launched in the Google Android Marketplace. The app allows users to send and receive geotagged SMS texts and will displays those received on a map. It also shows a compass needle and distance counter that can be followed to the destination.

The app itself is somewhat bare bones, as many reference applications are. But the potential for using this technology in other ways, including everything from socializing to rescue operations, is intriguing.

You can download the Android app from the Marketplace or scan the barcode here.  

"Cell phones," warns the company, "can be a great way for children to keep in touch with family members," but they can also "serve as facilitators for cyberbullying, sexting and other dangerous behaviors."

That claim may be true to a point, but is reading each and every text message the best way to counteract these behaviors? For that matter, should parents be spying on their kids to this extent at all?

WebWatcher cites data from the Pew Research Center that states some 75% of those aged 12-17 now own cell phones, and half of teens send over 50 messages per day. One in three sends more than 100.

(Hope you parents have a lot of free time on your hands, because that remote snooping is going to take you awhile!)

More importantly, the data point that's skipped over when touting spyware like this... err, I mean remote monitoring software... is that teens text instead of calling their friends in many cases. In fact, Pew says than teens are 10 times more likely to text someone than call them.

That means, for many teens, text messages are the primary form of communication among a child's friends.

And parents reading those texts? Well, that would be the equivalent of a parent in days past surreptitiously picking up the extension (you know - the phone attached to the wall with a cable?) in another room to eavesdrop on a child's conversation.

Parental Spyware: For Those Who Can't Handle Tech?

The WebWatcher Mobile product complements the company's standalone suite of monitoring tools, but it's hardly alone here. A whole crop of parental spyware applications have risen up to serve the needs of parents who can't figure out (or can't be bothered, or don't have the time) to understand the modern Web. The PTA-endorsed SocialShield product, for instance, is another recent entry into this field. Like WebWatcher, it works across a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Photobucket and others. SafetyWeb does the same. And of course there are the old standbys like Net Nanny, SpectorSoft and CyberPatrol, just to name a few.

Is this level of spying the right way to parent, though? There are alternates of course: Parents could educate their children instead, do spot checks to keep them on their toes, friend them on Facebook and elsewhere across the Web, and keep the computer in a public area of the home.

That said, there are some parents for whom monitoring software may be the right choice: the technologically un-savvy, for example. If the intricacies of Facebook and Twitter are confounding or if you still haven't figured out exactly how to type a text message yourself, you may be a good candidate for remote monitoring software.

A Warning to Parents Behind the Times

But keep in mind that your inability (or refusal?) to keep up with the times in terms of technology while allowing your children to outpace you by leaps and bounds is not only doing you a disservice - it's doing one to your children as well.

Sure, they may know their way around the social Web and cell phones better than you, but they haven't fully developed their interpersonal and social skills in a way that allows them to handle the issues that will inevitably come up.

As a new parent myself, I believe my job is to help my child learn and grow on her path to independence, which includes staying informed on all trends, both tech and otherwise. Parents who can't be bothered to figure out what that "tweet thing" is all about or what "sexting" is should not think this is a badge of honor to wear proudly, as if it makes them more mature somehow. It should be a signal that the world has surged ahead and they've been left behind in its wake.

And please, let's not make this a socio-economic issue, either. If you can't afford a computer or cell phone, then neither can your child. However, he or she may have access to them at friends' houses or at school. You have have access to them via your public library. Many public libraries offer free computer classes, too. You and your child could even take one together. Let your lack of technology comprehension guide you to a learning experience that helps you both, instead of being an issue where you child is left unparented because you don't know what you're doing.

Parental spyware, however, should be a last resort at best.

But that's just my opinion. What's yours?

The use of short code text messaging is very popular these days. Millions of people vote for the next American Idol star via text message, and just as many have donated money to the Red Cross during times of need right from their phones. Part of the reason for this popularity is the ease by which it is done, as well as the ubiquitous nature of text messaging.

Even the most basic mobile devices can send text messages, and texting is huge among younger generations who use it as a 24/7 lifeline to their friends. Cell phone use is especially high among less affluent demographics of society who may not be able to afford a broadband internet connection, but can certainly swing a cheap basic cell phone.

Now with Fast Follow, anyone can start following tweets as easy as they vote on American Idol or donate to the Red Cross. Now business, organizations and even people can say, "Follow me on Twitter by texting 'Follow @chcameron' to 40404," and people will know what that means and how to do it. There is much more familiarity with SMS short codes than there is with signing up for Twitter and following people that way.

What's more - letting non-users receive alerts is a great way to let people dip their toes in before jumping head first into the vast ocean that is Twitter. It is curious, however, to consider how being able to follow a user without an account will affect a user's follow count. Will a new category emerge that will tell us how many non-users are following?

Either way, it would not be surprising to see this decision pay off very well for Twitter in terms of adding users to the service - perhaps even from new demographics.

From Russia, With Love

According to Denis Maslennikov, Senior Malware Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, there's not an exact number of infected devices available at present, but the outbreak is currently regional. For now, only Russian Android users can actually lose money after installing the Trojan, but anyone can be infected.

The Trojan-SMS category of malware is relatively common in the mobile ecosystem, but this is the first to specifically target Android-based devices. However, FakePlayer is not the first malware designed for Android, says the firm, as there have been isolated incidents of Android devices infected with spyware, the earliest occurring in 2009.

The choice of targeting Android devices in particular should come as no surprise to those following mobile industry trends. Given Android's meteoric rise in market share, it's no surprise to Kaspersky, either:

"The IT market research and analysis organization IDC has noted that those selling devices running Android are experiencing the highest growth in sales among smartphone manufacturers," says Maslennikov. "As a result, we can expect to see a corresponding rise in the amount of malware targeting that platform."

Does Android Need AV?

According to a statement from Google, the application installation process is designed to protect users from attacks like these since it details what information and system resources the app has permission to access - such as sending an SMS. "Users must explicitly approve this access in order to continue with the installation," the statement reads. "We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust. In particular, users should exercise caution when installing applications outside of Android Market."

However, the release of a Trojan disguised as an app is an inventive way to get malware onto mobile devices. In this case, the Trojan takes advantage of users' lack of attention to the installation process as well as Google Android's openness - this operating system isn't tied to a closely managed and "curated" marketplace of approved applications like the iPhone is with iTunes. Although Google does step in to remove apps from its Market when security concerns are present, nothing prevents developers - especially nefarious ones like these - from forgoing official channels and publishing their own apps elsewhere, then tricking users into installing them.

But even if the Trojan came through backdoor channels, it's at least a small blow for an OS with security at the forefront of its design.

The security firm says it plans to release a version of Kaspersky Mobile Security for the Android operating system in 2011.

We can already picture the Apple vs. Android TV ads now: "iPhones aren't susceptible to the viruses plaguing Android phones..." Justin Long will smugly state. Now, who will play "Android guy?"