This is pretty disingenuous. It's the same exact two lines of code to do this in Twilio. Yes if you know ahead of time what those two lines are then you can type them in less than four minutes. Same goes for Twilio.
I think what patio11 is referring to is the amount of time it would take for a new developer who's never seen the Twilio API before to get up and running. This includes things like the time to understand the API and documentation. The actual writing of the code is always the easiest part of implementing something.
You make a great point, but it's also somewhat disingenuous ;)
It takes some time to learn how to use a platform.
It takes some time to code on a platform.
The actual writing of code is easiest when you are doing small applications. However, when you are writing larger applications the coding becomes the larger portion of time.
Today it's easier to learn Twilio than Tropo - largely because Tropo needs better documentation (that's coming very soon). However, I will contend that once you know the platform, Tropo is easier - and much more powerful.
I think that's what others are saying in this thread. We've also heard that from customers who have switched from Twilio to Tropo.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. Voxeo has been doing developer-centric telephony for ten years. Voxeo knows all the little problems and challenges that can come up over time and we've built a platform to address them.
Twilio is new to the industry, they came at things with a fresh set of eyes and were able to "re-factor" the simplicity and usability yet again with that fresh perspective.
I say "re-factor" because it's exactly what we did at Voxeo when we started in 1999. The experience reminds me of Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Fair enough. But if it takes 4 hours to figure out how to write these two lines of code, something's wrong. Documentation, complicated and confusing API, hard onramp to get started...
Our goal is to get a developer who knows nothing about telephony from signup to making their first phone calls and text messages in under 5 minutes.
message "something important happened", {:to => '14155551212', :network => 'SMS'}
And then one line of code to hit our session API over http and run the code.