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.
