Tuesday Tech: Get Texting To Work For You

Forget smartphones. We love them, a bunch of you love them too, and they can even help you lose weight. But that's all bells and whistles. What about texting? We started thinking about it, and there's some pretty awesome ways to make this basic technology work for you.
You could...
- Order food. Pizza Hut is my favorite example. (You can just save your number and your favorite pizza - and just text when you want it delivered! Dangerous. But awesome.)
- Sign up for text-based alerts in your area about traffic, weather, and emergencies. An easy way is to search for the phrase "text alerts" with your zipcode or city - usually that gets you where you need to go. If not, check your city's website.
- ESPN has great sports alerts - and you can customize them to your team, city, or sport.
- Keep an online grocery list here and bonus! - you can text the site for a simplified version once you're stuck in the bread aisle and can't remember what else you needed.
- Forgot to check whether it's raining tonight? Text the Weather Channel - 42278 ("4CAST") - with your zipcode or city name, and bam, instant forecast.
- My personal favorite: texting Google. How do you do it? Text to 46645 (GOOGL). My favorite queries: "movies 20010" (gets you all the movie listings in your zipcode) " directions 601 e st nw dc 20010 to kennedy center" (gets me from AARP to the Kennedy Center for my date night) "score cowboys" (gets me that critical preseason game's final score). You can find all the common queries here.
What are your favorite texting tricks? I've got lots more up my sleeve, but I want to know - do you text? What got you started doing it? What services do you use? Think we should text you breaking AARP-related news?