I work at Twilio and I wanted to clear up a couple misconceptions here for the record.

I didn't know who the author was prior to this post but from his about page he's the co-founder of Voxeo so this post is hardly impartial. He can write whatever he wants on his blog obviously, but keep that in mind. Comments on the site were also moderated preventing responses from some people.

It is not true that we only work with one carrier. We work with a variety of carriers to maximize our capabilities, geographic reach and redundancy. Twilio works with most of the same carriers as Google Voice.

In regards to prank calling, every phone service is used for pranks, Tropo included. In our case, it's a byproduct of making it easy for any web developer to get started in minutes. However, we've put in place safeguards (most notably validating outgoing caller IDs before they can be used) to minimize these types of activities.

We pride ourselves on support. We monitor Twitter constantly, we have people in IRC all the time (set office hours is just a focused discussion topic), and we try to respond to emails and forum posts as fast as possible. We have a team of people scouring Stack Overflow, Hacker News and events all over the country helping developers with their questions, related to Twilio OR NOT. Go find any blog post written about Twilio and see how quickly we responded. We answer the phones when you call, though we have some area to improve in that regard. We're actively working on it.

We support developers like nobody else. We feature them on our site in our Gallery http://www.twilio.com/gallery, we tweet about them, we blog regularly about what our customers build, we have a weekly developer contest to reward cool new apps and we generally go to great lengths to help promote what developers and startups are building using Twilio. We exist to empower you. We'd much rather talk about the cool problems real working developers solving then toot our own horn.

Everyone here knows how good EC2 is, I don't think I need to defend that issue. It's working wonderfully for us. We don't have any capacity or other issues related to our infrastructure. On a more general capacity note, we have yet to hit a limit of what we can handle, and we've worked on some huge projects. Go look at our customer list. These companies would not work with us if we couldn't handle their demands: http://www.twilio.com/gallery/customers These are just scratching the surface. There's another class of customer that's even bigger but doesn't like being talked about publicly.

We're hyper-focused on web developers. We (I'm a web dev myself) don't care about complicated telephony issues. We're too busy solving problems. Twilio works the way we work. Before I worked at Twilio I struggled trying to implement features that took me minutes once I discovered the Twilio API. It already spoke what I knew already and that's just simply HTTP.

We are not the right solution for every single developer; nothing is. But we have a rock solid solution that's working for over 20,000 developers and growing rapidly. If you're conflicted, try both services out for yourself. Don't listen to either company, just see for yourself which you like better. And if we can help in any way, we're listening.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me directly at jsheehan@twilio.com