After a long hiatus abroad and working on a new project, I came home this August to a barrage of inquires regarding the usage of mobile phones in this year's election. While I had been following all of the news enthusiastically, I had very limited access to my US text messaging abilities and thus could not take part in what has been going on first hand.

This does not mean that I do not have my thoughts which, as someone removed from the process for a while, I hope may be somewhat refreshing.

Get your red-hot presidential ringtones!; customize your very own Obamalogo at Logobama; send a video message directly to one of the campaigns; track Clinton's new web-based fundraising push; and find out which candidate is most popular on Twitter.

Toward the end of last week, the John Edwards campaign pulled off a bit of a technological coup — they got around the inherent limits of raising money via cell phone text message. But here's the rub: the tools they used may not work as well again for Edwards, or for anyone else for that matter.

Here's what happened. As Justin Oberman ably described on Friday: