What is it?
Txtbux.co.uk was a site which allowed users to comparison shop between real life bookshops, and Amazon on the web. Users texted (SMS) the ISBN of a book they're interested in to a special number; it then checked on the web, and sent a message back with the price - and sent an e-mail to the user with a link to buy from Amazon.
What's the story?
I built the site in around 2002/3 as a bit of an experiment to see how a web service could be used on mobiles. At the time, the only way of accessing data services from a mobile was WAP, which didn't work on most phones and was incredibly slow and nasty to use.
I wanted to try using SMS as the interface - at the time this was pretty unique (I got a full page article about it in Cre@te Online - at the time, one of the biggest magazines for web professionals).
It pre-dated Amazon making their data available through an API, so whenever someone texted in, it would screen-scrape the Amazon website to find the info it needed, and shrunk it all down into the 160 characters you can fit in an SMS reply. Users would be sent an e-mail with full product details so that when they returned to their computers, they could purchase the item - earning me commission to fund the service. Although only ever operating on a small scale, it turned out to be profitable. If only I could have scaled it up by a factor of a million!
I thought it would have a fairly short life as a service, as I was convinced that phones would fairly soon be easily data-enabled, and people would access this kind of info through a mobile web browser. It turned out I was correct, although it took longer than I expected. Txtbux turned out to have a regular user base for several years, until I decided that with the widespread adoption of smartphones, and specialised apps for mobile price checking, it was time to mothball the site.