I've been holed up in the apartment coding an Awesome Science Project all weekend, so I'm a bit too exhausted to try this out at the moment — but I just got an email indicating that Mozes has just announced developer support for their text-messaging product.

If you don't remember Mozes' debut, I don't blame you. Basically, they've bought an SMS short code — one of those nifty five-digit phone numbers that you can text things to (instead of using a cumbersome ten digit code like some services I know). You go to their website, register for a keyword that's unique to you, and then... uh... things happen. Maybe. When other folks SMS your keyword to Mozes, they get your contact info. And you can store song titles and stuff. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest.

But! Although I don't see the appeal of their SMS-based note-taking functionality, I think the newly-announced developer access is a big, big deal. So far as I can tell, it lets you hook a script up to your Mozes keyword. So you can host a service elsewhere on the web and get free SMS service via Mozes. This is a fairly cool thing to get for free — shortcodes cost $2k to set up, then $1k/month after that — and that's before the charge you have to pay for every SMS you send or receive. Having your users specify your keyword for every query might be a pain, but for simple apps this could be a great way for developers to get SMS capabilities without having to find funding first.

Of course, if you start to make money off of the service you can bet that Mozes will shut you down pretty quickly. Hell, if Mozes starts to make money off of reselling their short code, I imagine the telcos will shut them down pretty quickly.

But it's a neat service, and a step in the right direction. Mobile services are a pretty closed set of systems right now. But that can't last. This stuff is going to continue to get more accessible to the common geek, I think.