Most of mobile carriers offer free Email To SMS gateways which can be used to forward simple text emails to a mobile phones. And the good news, majority of those gateways are free and available to the general public.

You just need to know the number and the carrier of the recipient to start emailing them to mobile phone. Below we put together a table listing free email to SMS gateways for different carriers. You can use as quick reference both for US and international mobile numbers.

Here’s the list of Email to SMS gateways from Africa and around the world:

• MTN (South Africa) [number]@sms.co.za
• Vodacom (South Africa) [number]@voda.co.za
• Setar Mobile email (Aruba) 297+[number]@mas.aw
• Mero Mobile (Nepal) 977[number]@sms.spicenepal.com
• Emtel (Mauritius) [number]@emtelworld.net
• BPL Mobile (Mumbai, India) [number]@bplmobile.com
• Airtel (Karnataka, India) [number]@airtelkk.com

There are also a number of websites that allow you to send free SMS’ via the web. Be cautious though. Sites like these are often suspected of selling your registered cell phone numbers to marketers and spammers: GizmoSMS , TextMeFree , VienSMS

Now that Twitter has purchased Summize and corrected some seriously boneheaded moves, their next major moves need to be in the mobile space.  VentureBeat makes some interesting points on this very subject. If I were the powers that be at Twitter I would be looking to snatch up all of the best thirdparty applications using the API.  This would Include Hahlo and Tweetdeck, or possibly Twitterific (which has the feature-set of both).  Rather than spend more money and time trying to compete with these existing products, why not bring them into the fold? In addition, they need to take a hard look at the functionality provided by TwitterFeeder.  I use TwitterFeeder to announce that I’ve updated my blogs.  Without it, I have to do this manually. 

I’m not suggesting TwitterFeeder in and of itself is worthy of acquisition (the staff at Twitter could write this code in a heartbeat) but the functionality would be useful to Twitter users. It would also allow them to compete more directly with FriendFeed and Tumblr.