Swarmteams is a service for group communication that integrates multi-recipient SMS, IM, RSS and VOIP. While there are many companies launching that focus entirely on group SMS alone, Swarmteams is the most ambitious system I’ve seen yet for rapid multi-person communication. The company says it’s tried to mirror the natural swarming behavior of animals in designing the system. Unfortunately, in the testing we did - our animal instincts were left frustrated. We felt more like a mob of donkeys than a well co-ordinated flock of soaring birds. In other words, the system doesn’t seem to work very well yet. I hope the system will improve with time because I think the company has some great ideas.
Based in Belfast, Ireland, the six person team says it’s just started accepting payment for paid accounts, which are required after a group sends its first 50 messages. Messages are 10 cents apiece, which could get expensive, but if you use a service like this only when it’s important the price may be fair. That’s presuming it works, of course, which so far it does not - at least not for myself and the several people I tested it with. If the following functionality sounds valuable to you, perhaps you can take the time to make it work better for your group. I think the service is a very good idea. We tested the basic level of service, there are also pro levels and an API.
Swarmteams groups can communicate together by SMS messages that go out to everyone and are archived on a web page that publishes an RSS feed. Group communication can be received by IM or email and administrators can set up a group Skype call with a single click. All of these different passages for communication can be set to various permission levels for different users by the group’s administrator. Within their permission level, individual users can request message delivery through any or all of the available means (SMS, IM, RSS and email).
No downloads are required for web or mobile use of the system. Group members don’t have to do anything but confirm their participation in the group in order to receive and respond to messages. An admin can manage multiple groups, or swarms, through a tabbed interface.
Supported IM systems so far are MSN, Skype and ICQ. The implementation could use some changes here and there; when I send a message out to the group by web interface I don’t want to get a copy of it myself by SMS, for example. One of our test users couldn’t accept her invitation by SMS and she should have been able to. Sending files didn’t work well at all, it took quite a long time for messages to be received, Skype IM messages never worked for us and it was a generally frustrating experience to test Swarmteams out.
That said, groups interested in putting this to serious use may be able to take the time to make it work. The feature set looks great, even if it’s not the most intuitive thing to use the first time. I hope that it will be fixed, as I can imagine that any number of groups could find it quite useful for rapid interaction. Our coverage of the Apple “It’s Showtime” event last week, for example, would have been a great time to have group SMS and IM integrated in a web service.
Other, related services that offer similar features include MXit and Nimbuzz.
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Radio Handi offers a similar service that enables users to create groups about any topic, and to communicate among themselves via email (listserv), SMS (alerts and chat) and voice (conference calling and group voice message boards). The service was relaunched recently with a new site design, and is a local call in over 30 countries (SMS is currently available in the US and Canada). It is a hosted service, so no desktop or mobile client software is required.
The service also includes some interesting telecasting features, such as the ability to broadcast a conference call as a live MP3 stream, which is useful for things like distance learning, ad hoc broadcasts for live events, etc. Although the service is more audio/voice focused, the email and SMS functionality makes it easy to send broadcast emails and SMS out to a group, as well as to do simple SMS group chats.
Hi Marshall and thank you for this good review. I am rather curious to know more about the issues you have encountered when testing Swarmteams as my experience (which is definitely biased) has been quite positive until now. I even use Swarm-it! to send a daily notification to my virtual newsroom spread between Italy, Argentina and Japan with extreme ease of use and split-second performance.
To me Swarteams is very easy to use and outside of issues I may have not been able to be exposed to, very effective.
If you have not had the time to give it a look I have shot a full screencast video of how the tool works and shared my personal opinions about it on the day of its release:
http://tinyurl.com/jfwen
Look forward to learn more!
‘Mob of donkeys’ mwuhahahaha that was good…
Marshall
Thanks for your comments which are very useful to us as we launch our new service! I am sorry you had some frustrations in testing the product but I am also encouraged by your very positive comments on the basic swarmteams concept and vision.
Heres a few quick things, which we have not yet properly communicated in the product user info, which should help a new user:
1. You only get copied on your own messages if the box in your profile is ticked – we find users like this comfort at the start when they are getting used to the system but then just turn it off by unticking the box ‘receive copy of own messages’
2. From our delivery statistics all your SMS messages in your 10 or so test group broadcasts were successfully sent and received – bar one which we are investigating. In terms of speed of delivery our consistent user feedback is that we generally achieve sub 10 seconds in all broadcasts and replies to the US or Europe so I will investigate why yours was slower.
3. One of the limits of SMS is the 160 character restriction. Only the text which you put in the ‘subject’ box of a message is sent via SMS. Any text you put in the ‘body’ goes out by email or IM – it does not go to SMS. This might have caused some of your frustration?
4. We need to ensure users understand that Swarmteams is a ‘short messaging system’ where you convey as much info as you can in the short message (subject) as this is all your mobile phone users will receive. Although the 160 characters appears a limitation of SMS it is in fact a major strength as it is exactly the right size for effective messaging in groups. This does cause user confusion at the start and we are looking at how we can improve how we manage it.
Anyway – many thanks for test driving Swarmteams and I look forward to ensuring you get a smoother ride next time!
Best Regards
Ken Thompson
Founder and CEO, Swarmteams
InWeb 2.0, there is always room for improvement. If one consumer had issues, then other will also have issues. However, thanks for the lowdown.
how about http://www.moblabber.com.. same features but different approach.