I use this free service all the time, its works when cell service doesnt,  and Jeff set it up to understand nick names and abbreviations too.

Yeah, this is a brilliant little app.
Also let's you set your favorites and get results from multiple rivers at one time.

See this is good.. doing some R&D for Jeff to work out the kinks !!  I'm not a tech guy so maybe it is your service ??

when I had Tmobile it worked, but that was a while ago.

Thanks for the kind words - glad you all are using and enjoying the service!

As for carriers, I know the service works on Verizon and AT&T, and that it does not currently work on Sprint or TMobile. I have to go through a middle man for the service to access the carriers' networks, and both Sprint and TMobile charge too much to the middle man for it to be worth it for him to support their networks.

Also, several people have pinged me with some similar questions, so here's some info about the service that may not be obvious:

River Names
The service can return levels from any USGS gauge in the country (and quite a few other gauge sources too). If you simply send a river name, it tries to return the gauge for the most popular section of the river. So "level green" will return the Green River near Palmer. But if you send the full name of the river, it will usually return a list of all gauges on that river. So "level green river" will return a list of all Green River gauges. Of course, this is for the entire US, so "level green river wa" will limit it somewhat.
   I say "usually" and "somewhat" above because this depends on how the USGS defines the river name. For example, the North Fork of the Skokomish is listed on the USGS site as both "NF Skokomish R" and North Fork Skokomish River" depending on the gauge. The service tries to compensate for this, but there's a lot of variation.

Shortcuts
Whenever possible, I try to reduce thumb typing. Like Fish said, it knows lots of nicknames and abbreviations. Typing "level robe" instead of "level South Fork Stillaguamish" saves a lot of thumb strokes! But both work. Some other examples are:
level Tum = Tumwater (Wenatchee at Peshastin)
level LW = Little White Salmon
level MF Nook = Middle Fork of the Nooksack
level Q = Big Quilcene

Favorites
You can add up to 3 favorites at a time. It's first in, first out - so if you add a 4th favorite, the oldest one gets bumped off the list. The service tries to compress the favorites message so that you get all 3 levels in 1 message.

Web site
Riverlevels.us has some more info about the service, shortcuts, gauge sources, etc. It also has a simulator where you can try it out without sending a text message.

Let me know if I'm missing any gauges! (I'm already working on adding the SF Skykomish for the Top Tye.)

- Jeff