Teleflip isn’t new but I had not heard about it until Noah Kagan at Facebook pinged me tonight to tell me about it. It is an incredibly simple way to send a text/sms message to any North American cell phone.
Teleflip™ started when the founder became increasingly frustrated at his inability to send text messages to friends’ cell phones from his PC. It was of course possible, but you had to know the cell phone provider, the correct domain name and the correct syntax for the email address. There had to be an easier way….Teleflip™ was born.
You do not even need to go to the site to use it. Simply email a message to [cellnumber]@teleflip.com and the message is sent immediately (I received a test message in less than one minute). I will use this all the time. It is free and there is no advertising.
If I were them I’d start adding advertising.
i’ve been doing this with AIM for almost 2 years now. its fully integrated into the code, you can even add cell numbers as a friend and instantly text them and receive them through aim or whatever client you choose.
While this can be hugely convenient, I believe this presents an opportunity for the most nefarious spam problem ever.
On many cell phones, you are charged for every text message received. I have a Cingular Blackberry 7100 with a full data plan and I am STILL charged $0.10 for each text message to my cell # (but not regular e-mail). Crazy but true. And I have no control. Send it and I pay.
So this opens an opportunity for spam that costs you directly for every message.
With Teleflip someone playing a prank, from a bogus e-mail account, could send you 100 messages an hour overnight and you’d be looking at $80 in charges from spam.
Teleflip will need to create a system for registering to receive e-mail if they want this to take off. And that will increase friction to adoption.
–Sucky Marketing Guy
Ps. Someome tell me if I’m wrong here. If I am, Mike delete this comment so Teleflip doesn’t get a bad name for no reason.
SM - I think registration would be fine. And ads on the page. I’d even be ok with a small add in the text message.
I have a plan on cingular that’s like $5 per month or something similar for unilimited SMS both ways.
Great service. This could be useful for a service such as evite or zvents. As an event approaches, it texts your trust list of contacts or RSVPs as a reminder. Many promoters do this, but in tedious fashion throughout Miami.
-JLB
Awhile ago I’ve created a firefox extension that uses several services (teleflip is one of them) to send messages to any carrier within US. I’ve not had the time to investigate anything about foreign carriers, but I sure will when I have the time. You can download it here: http://www.ipalem.com. It also should be avaiable on mozilla soon, but for some reason it’s taking them over a month now to approve it.
I could have sworn I used something like this 5 years ago…
Oh and by the way, unlimited text/data plans aren’t really that expensive. I have unlimited on my Treo, makes life so easy.
Does anyone know of a British and/or European service which is similiar. Several have come and gone over the years but I do not know of any now. Are there any VOIP services doing this?
SM Guy: You can do any of that spam without teleflip. You would just need to know the user’s provider and append the proper domain (ie mms.cingular.com). Or even without the provider, just bulk email to the target number with all valid U.S. mobile domains, for instance.
So the spam possibility has always been there, with or w/o teleflip.
Why would anyone do this when you can use your gmail account and set +cell@gmail.com to forward to your cellphone. (that way you also get a copy in your email) for example if your email is tggmst@gmail.com then you would set all emails composed to tggmst+cell@gmail.com to forward to you. gmails + and forward settings are far better than this.
I’ve been using Teleflip for about 4 months now. I still prefer to use AIM for sending text over the internet, but this is a good alternative.
It’s weird because I usually find out about stuff like that from Techcrunch. I thought that was how I found out about Teleflip - I guess not.
We have a number of services like this in England. I use http://www.e-txt.co.uk. The format’s the same [mobilenumber]@e-txt.co.uk where [mobilenumber]is the international version. There is a whole industry based on this see http://www.text.it however the standard approach is that the sender pays rather than the recipient.
I never realized it before this post (which frequently happens at TechCrunch :-)), but Yahoo messenger also supports SMS…just browse your address book and click the mobile icon, couldn’t be easier.
This reminds me of my first reaction to Skype when it first came out: waitaminnit, I’ve been using this for years in Yahoo! I rambled about this here, the main point being that I think that a lot of what makes Web 2.0 a “new version” is the fact that many Web 1.0 functionalities were either poorly marketed, poorly implemented, or both.
Yahoo re-launched messenger as “Yahoo Messenger with Voice” — as far as I can tell, the voice features stayed pretty much the same, but Skype had made it important for Yahoo to put more marketing muscle behind the feature. Maybe now it’ll be “Yahoo Messenger with Voice, SMS, Chat, and File Sharing”…
Before I check it out, I have been using this site: http://www.smseverywhere.com. It lets me send SMS from my browser and absolutely no registration. Just type in the message, choose the provider, and off it goes in less than 2 minutes. It’s free and works in North America. There is a limitation though, I tried sending it more than 4 times within an hour and the fifth time it said I already reached my limit and need me to wait til the next hour.
I’ve known this service for quite sometime but unfortunately it supports only USA as of now, not India
This is a great idea, but what all the nay sayers are missing is that it is for the benefit of the sender not the receiver. meaning if the receiver does not wish to create and manage an incoming email forward for messages then the sender can easily get the message out without becoming a detective. Far as paying for unwanted messages even if they are from people you know and have value I bet many of the carriers will turn off the feature of receiving txt messages, I have done the same for voice mail that I do not need.
haha, this is cuker service, just US only. hah hah again. internet/international? common, where are those guys living?
I think the point that many are missing is that this service determines the carrier for you. Yes, we all know that you can send a message to a phone using number@carrier_domain, but how often do you know the other person’s carrier? In fact, even though I’m pretty sure there is a way to find out the number space that carrier owns (email me if you know), how do you determine a carrier when the number was transferred to another carrier is even more interesting. And of couse, internationally this gets even more complicated as not many countries do not disclose that info. I guess, in a way this sort of relates to how the whole telephony system now operates. Specifically how does skype is able to own so many numbers in different countries. Do they rent those numbers permanently on per account base, or are they doing something different? Again if you know anything about this let me know.
can do this through google’s toolbar site pretty easily for free.
http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms
I think some of the commentors are missing the point of Teleflip.
With Teleflip you don’t need to know the carrier of your message recipient, you only have to know their phone number. Teleflip figures out the carrier’s SMS domain, etc, etc. It does all the heavy lifting.
DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE. I thought the teleflip thing was cool and sent myself and a friend a message. Within an hour I started to get spam on my phone via text message. DO NOT USE TELEFLIP.
Brian - Nonsense. If this was a new service I’d believe its possible, but as I said I was late to see this, and I can’t find anything on the web about people complaining. I’ve been using this and have not received any spam whatsoever. Before you slam a perfectly wonderful free service, please look into this more.
This is so much better than having to figure out each Carrier’s ID. I have used a couple services such as this one. But at least one of them turned out to be misusing the wireless number for spam and other purposes.
Does anyone know how Teleflip uses the wireless number after the SMS is sent? Is it persisted in their system. If so for how long? Why?
What is their business model? Do they use the number for other services that are not transparent to the subscribers?
Just read their privacy policy and it is not comforting. Similar to what companies like Plaxo have. I don’t know if TeleFlip uses the data for marketing purposes now, but their privacy policy allows them to:
http://www.teleflip.com/teleflip/ppolicy.jsp;
of course with user approval, but we know how well that works.
I have been searching the net for two days now and tried at least 20 different apps and clients/services and I still cannot find anything SMS PC to Mobile free for the UK. Does anyone care about it over here? Or are we a backward country? Still trying.
BTW Brian, if you think you are being spammed because you used the TeleFlip service, I recommend you report it to them. According to their website they have a “One strike - You are out” policy. http://www.teleflip.com/teleflip/faqpage.jsp
While I think that the service offered by Teleflip is great and simple, I feel that it has serious flaws related to SPAM, billing model and reach. I discussed both in my blog posting on http://www.ipipi.com (http://blog.ipipi.com/blog/_archives/2005/1/11/237663.html).
Namely, while Teleflip has honest and progressive anti SPAM policy, it is not able to stop malicious use of its service. It is too easy to spoof IP address or email address for any throttling block to work efficiently.
Similarly, the billing model of email to SMS services/gateways is wrong. It is as if you had to pay for each piece of mail you received. Finally, the reach of Teleflip and similar services is limited to North America.
Stuart, for the reasons above it is not possible to find a service similar to Teleflip in most other countries in the world. The reason is economic in nature. When the sender pays there needs to be a business model associated with provisioning of such a service. There were many services over the years that offered PC to mobile SMS. Most of them were ad supported, however, few, if any remain today.
In my opinion, the only model that works is a paid one - which is what we at http://www.upsidewireless.com adopted. This prevents SPAM (economy does not work for spammers), provides global and two-way instant communication. Our customers mostly agree that it is also inexpensive and in many cases irreplaceable mean of communication.
REply to Branco.
Thank you for your considered reply. After much thought I have now reasoned that an inexpensive model such as yours is a better economic model. However I predict that VOIP services will adopt a free SMS service for their paying customers i.e. Skypeout as a bait to reel in Non American
users. I see a divide forming.
No one has discussed how Teleflip is figuring out the proper @carrier.com suffix?
I personally think that all that is happening here is that they try to send to all US providers and when they don’t get an error, they log the users number and the carrier that worked. Then they use this information for future sends. To speed the process up.
Just a thought. I hope its more complicated than that! Anyone have any ideas how they are doing this?
Just reading all your comments. We figured out how to get the carrier info for every cellphone in USA/Canada. We only send one email per Teleflip (there are over 70 providers in North America). It’s a minimal cost to host the mailservers. We don’t store the emails, the email addresses, nor the cell numbers.
No spam. No selling numbers.
We’ve been running the servers since 2003 with no valid complaints.
Enjoy!
Guy@Teleflip.com
Founder
Funny in that not funny way. I discovered teleflip on February 13. One week later it is gone!
It looks to be a good service. I’m wondering if the fact that it’s completely free makes some think twice… you know, the it’s too good to be free type of thing… there has to be something going on.
Just a thought.
asbestos cancer danger38
When the site becomes extremely popular as a free service it will be sold. Short advertisements will be attached to each message like the free yahoo email service by the new owner. I wish I thought of it!
I think TeleFlip is a great innovation and very useful service.
But, it’s not very easy to protect. In a fact, everyone can build similar service in matter of days.
How to figure out the carrier by cell phone number then? Contact NeuStar, they can offer the number lookup service. They also announced a new pricing model last month which is VERY attractive to newborn startups.
Sorry Guy, but I just want to see this industry a little more transparent to avoid bubbles.
I see nothing wrong with what Teleflip is doing, they are providing what seems like a great service for free. The issue here seems to be that no opt-in via short code is required. We run a site http://www.webtext.com with a strict anti-spam policy, these guys have gone around the short-code opt-in system but seem to be acting very responsibly. Best of luck to them. I may be wrong but I think US short code regulations would not allow their service (which I think is a great) on a short code, does anyone know if this is true?
Anthony
Without the ability to opt out of SMS reception, which is in fact the case with major US cellular service providers such as T-Mobile, this service is detrimental to those who do not want to receive SMS messages. Yes, I know, I’ve heard it a thousand times before: someone can just email cell@cell-provider-domain.com or use some other service, given they know the provider. However, proponents seem to miss the point entirely. This simplifies an otherwise more involved process and opens it up to immense abuse.
right on billy. I don’t use my cell for sms nor do I want to. The last thing I need is for people to start using this damn serrvice.