Testing SMS services: Moka

I recently received an invite to a private beta (who hasn’t these days). The service is called Moka Groups. It used to be a book delivery by SMS service and now I don’t really know yet what it does. I think it’s now SMSifying your AIM, Gtalk, and Yahoo IM and letting you create contact groups for that purpose. Aside from a few FireFox related bugs, the sign up went well until I tried to activate my SMS number — it threw up a very scary Application Execution Exception and wouldn’t send a verification code.

Here’s the thing. When I read through the error message I can see they are using ColdFusion. Immediately I am suspecting that this company is not building a scalable SMS service. I might be wrong in that suspicion, after all, I am not a programmer and while I have heard of lots of cool people building large ColdFusion apps out there — I really don’t hear about new and popular web services using this platform these days.

While the Twitters of the world are all playing around with Ruby — are any serious developers still into ColdFusion? Unless they are forced to maintain an old code base, I doubt it. Suspicions aside, I’ll try Moka again in another day or two to see if the exception is fixed.

Google Desktop Search Beta review

I’ve been trying out Google Desktop Search for three years now. First on Windows, now on a Mac. I use it like most power mac users use Quicksilver — to launch applications and open documents without using the finder. It’s fast, and doesn’t require me to learn how to use it like QS. I just start typing a few letters and usually within seconds it displays the file, email, web site, or application I want to open.

Can Google really get away with calling this a Beta product anymore? Yes, I see plenty of room for improvement. Like the updater. In three years of using and updating GDS, I still get confused every time I see this message:

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