It's not really a messaging system, it's a push notification system that everyone who has a smartphone is subscribed to.
You probably have a phone that can accept MMS, and a corresponding phone number.
Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.
Individual systems might be great at specific things (motion detection, security systems, etc.).
Dogs are living beings, they can be trained by average humans to do new things that your typical security system never imagined.
> " I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox."
That is what I thought. But actually, in practice, once one has moved from some old Nokia brick to a modern smartphone, the assumption is wrong. SMS has its place for sending someone a quick text but it is going the way of FAX, to be only used in some arcane circumstances.
With SMS the delivery was not as good as email. As mentioned, there is perfectly good wifi where I live but marginal phone signal. In theory I could find some remote mountain where there is only 2G but even then emails get delivered at least in header form.
The other thing is that when I had my SMS notifications I had to buy credits in advance. If the monitored sites were completely down and notifications were being sent to three people then those credits could run out quickly. So there was that unnecessary dependency on a third party service that had some credits to pay for in order for it to work. Totally non-strategic!
If we think of the dog and the selfies, say the dog just happens to tap the button every few seconds. That could be expensive with SMS but free on email.
You can also build some backup into the email approach, you can cc your private email as well as email your work one. There is none of the 140 character message length nonsense either.
Plus, who doesn't check their phone every 6 minutes or so?
To be slightly unfair, TFA is marketing spam. Even the box is over-engineered, you can get wifi PTZ cameras for small change on eBay and a few of them have an input for a switch so you can take 'selfies' with them, no wheel reinvention needed.
> Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.
You can't have push notifications for certain subjects or email addresses? If you're going to make home security part of this, you might as well set up your email to be accommodating to it as well. If you're gonna use email.
It's not really a messaging system, it's a push notification system that everyone who has a smartphone is subscribed to.
You probably have a phone that can accept MMS, and a corresponding phone number.
Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.
Individual systems might be great at specific things (motion detection, security systems, etc.).
Dogs are living beings, they can be trained by average humans to do new things that your typical security system never imagined.