The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry’s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length).
3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company - your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.
The List
- Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today.
- 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
- Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
- Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
- Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch.
- Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
- Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo.
- Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.
There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post - but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.
The Features
What exactly is Free+”Operator cost”? Costs the sender/receiver?
I get all my Dodgeball messages via email.
you are totally forgetting about upoc who did this as early as 2000. they’ve had theyr system up and runnning since.
Ok sorry this is totally off the topic, i’m extremely sorry but i can’t keep this quite any longer.
I think someone should say something, why is engadget allowed to have two sites that cover the same product, with exact same text which creates a duplicate in the search engines. I think this is extrememly greedy and unfair practice I thought that dulpicate content in search engines was a bad thing. Engadget all the time recently list the exact same entries and text on engadget and it’s engadgetmobile and engadethd sites.
here is a example:
of engadget and engadgethd , they do it all the time all the time i see engadget and engadgetmobile
http://www.engadget.com/2006/0.....h-plasmas/
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006.....h-plasmas/
http://www.google.com/search?h.....Wooo10000+
I can’t believe the aggornace and total greed of these people why are they allow to have two sites that cover the exact same content and product entries.
Craig
moblabber is also capable of web to sms…
Startups.in/India, Free + “Operator cost” means the service has no costs associated with it, but users may still face charges from their cell phone companies for sending and receiving SMS messages.
is there a comment/commenting policy here at TechCrunch? i.e. what is permissible to say and not say? etc.
danke!
Radio Handi offers group sms, email and voice conferencing in over 30 countries (SMS service is available in the US and Canada). It was first demoed in January at the O’Reilly Media Emerging Telephony conference, and has been publicly available since May, with a website redesign in August.
who uses these services? i don’t know anyone who uses any of these services much less have heard of them? talk about technology for the sake of technology…none of these services removes a ‘pain point’, solves a pre-existing problem or improves your life…imho.
Thanks Ed. Thinking about it, I think it’d make more sense for the operators themselves to provide these services. Atleast the basic services like broadcasting SMS messages to a list etc.
Brian, RadioHandi rocks!
i’m with jason. i haven’t heard of most of them, and i’ve yet to be convinced that they address a real pain point. i use my phone for voice and that’s it. maybe i’m just old school. i did come across a pretty entertaining and illustrative demo of loopt on you tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjHuwMXUneg
Group SMS, in of itself, is not as useful as it seems. We offer it, but it’s one of those things that sounds good on paper, but when you actually use it to chat with a lot of people, it turns into Barnum & Bailey’s Three Ring Circus. We were surprised by that, as we thought SMS chat was going to be a hit, until we did usability testing.
The problem with it, I think, is that people use SMS as a cross between email and IM. It’s a fast store-and-forward service, so you can get a message to someone quickly, but also do not necessarily need them to reply immediately (i.e. “be at metreon at 8pm. ttyl”). using it for chat is difficult because most people are not riveted to their phone 24×7 and may not notice a message for several minutes. that’s ok for blasting out a “meet us at X” message to 20 people, but if you try to chat with 20 people at once, you get people replying to messages that were sent 5 or 10 minutes ago. it’s not a technology problem, it’s because people don’t hear the message come in and don’t respond instantly so there’s really nothing you can do to fix that.
It wasn’t the response we expected, that’s why it’s always good to do usability tests, even informal ones, with non-tech types, because it’s easy to make a lot of assumptions about what people will do and how they will use a product.
Twitter *does* support “web to sms”. You can send you updates to all your friends, or you can send a private message from web to phone. (even internationally)
Honestly, who cares… None of these guys are ever going to make money.
With decreasing airtime prices and increasing broadband penetration, people have pretty good alternatives to using their tiny phones to do all of this.
I remember how T-Mobile tried to promote their AOL SMS chat about 3 years ago. Hmm, they never got people to use it - why were they thinking people were so dumb to use it in the first place
Feedburner claiming there are now 1115k readers of TC! Woohoo! Haha.
The reality is that if people start to use multi-person SMS, the carriers are going to want in on the action so they can get more money out of their users. They will develop their own service (this is pretty simple to do) and work with handset manufacturers to get native support for this into the handset itself - which will vastly improve the usability of the feature.
What do you mean by Carriers all? And Location based - no?
Please realize that there are countries outside the United States of America too. You should have mentioned All US carriers. Or maybe techcrunch believes and expects only US citizens to come,read articles here?
Jason, the carriers part at least really should have indicated US or not. My apologies to our international readers.
I’m with Jason on this one. I don’t see these services solving any real problems or offering enough REAL benefit to users. Not enough to justify the effort anyway. Mobile/Web integration still has a long way to go and mobile marketing is still very misunderstood.
Congrats Techcrunch on hitting 1115K RSS readers! lol.
Whats the point of comparing low level technical features? How can you compare pinger with loopt? The first is a voice messaging service, the second a buddy finder. I would had liked to see a much more [elaborate] article, talking more about the value each of them bring to users.
I like the analysis done…thanks. As to the usefulness of the service……doesn’t do much for me but I’m sure the kids will use it more. It seems very easy for the big guys to replicate, so I expect its a race to get your company bought
I was more interested in the comment that DEMO was not dominated by mobile launches…does this imply the mobile tide is receding?
http://www.ohdontforget.com
Much simpler than any of these guys, and more useful, and more free
Thanks for the comments, all!
Multi-person SMS may not seem too interesting to some people at first, but almost everyone who uses text messaging and tries out 3jam gets that “a-ha!” moment. It’s actually pretty cool to watch people’s reactions (here’s one: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/?p=232) . At DEMO, we used it quite a bit to coordinate dinner and meeting times between the 6 of us who were all over the place! Personally, I use it a lot when meeting up with different friends during a night out.
Over at 3jam, we spent almost a year planning, building, and many, many cycles iterating on the product. As active indivuduals, we wanted the most effective way to communicate with any number of friends when we were on the go.
We already used text messaging, and it did a great job for easy, fast, one-to-one communications. For this purpose, no other medium did the job as efficiently - voice requires everyone be available and in quiet location to talk, and not everyone has email and IM on the phone.
We thought long and hard about how we could make it truly easy to use anywhere we were, and came up with five main requirements:
1) Usable on any phone with no special software
2) Ad-hoc selection of friends and no predefined groups required
3) Have everyone know who is in the reply-all conversation
4) Reply-to-all simply by responding to the message
5) Ability to have multiple conversations going on at once
Brian from Radio Handi is right about large numbers in a single session being hard to manage, and we saw the same thing in our early versions when groups were fixed and had to be defined beforehand. That’s why we created ad-hoc functionality. It was hard to do, but once we did it, the problem went away.
We’re not a public chat room application, or a broadcast-only service, and most users “get it” if they inadvertantly include a lot of people in their first 3jam. The average size of each 3jam session today is around 3-6 people.
Our goal is to make it easy for people to communiate with a bunch of friends on the fly, and we truly believe that there’s absolutely no better way to do so than 3jam’s reply-all text messaging. And from what our users are telling us, there are others out there who feel the same way
Do give 3jam a shot, and we think you’ll see why. Thanks.
Sorry to hear you spent a year building something that is basically available as opensource:).
This type of service
http://playsms.sourceforge.net/web/
Current Features
- Forward single SMS from mobile phone to a group of mobile phones (mobile2mobiles)
a year seems to be a bit long. How much time was spent on usability? i’m a project manager by hobby but it seems like you spent too much on the tech end and not enough time understanding the practicality of this kind of service. From a business standpoint, how do you plan to make money? If it’s free now, how can you later switch it to a pay service? If you add advertising in the text messages, you’ll piss off users who don’t want their conversation intruded on. If you add a premium service, you’ve misunderstand your user base…here are some questions for you to think about…1) I think you guys said your target age range is 5-35…this is way too general 2) If we break it down…kids from ages 5-22 will not pay for premium services to text messaging 3) 22 and over have done pretty well with what’s currently out there in terms of coordinating w/ friends. I’m not bashing…just wanted to give you guys food for thought. I like your enthusiasm and your willingness to listen to all opinions…good or bad. I’m pulling for you.
Thanks for the info, Rich. We haven’t downloaded PlaySMS yet but from a quick glance, it looks like a SMS broadcast tool from the web. Our first version of 3jam (back in December 2005) sort of resembled this, but we felt the service needed “reply-all” functionality to be truly useful. Take e-mail, for instance - imagine if you could only e-mail one person at a time, or if recipients could not reply to everyone the email was addressed to…this would diminish the usefulness of e-mail by quite a bit. Text messaging is no different.
Jason, thanks for the suggestions and food for thought. We’ve thought long and hard about all the points you mentioned. Much of the time has gone into 3jam’s usability - both using it as well as figuring out how to make it better. In fact, we use it every day. Someone just included me in a 3jam with 2 other friends half an hour ago to see if we wanted to grab lunch. So I simply hit “reply”, typed “sorry, can’t - working through lunch”, and done… everyone knew!
It’s taken a while for 3jam to evolve into the product it is today, and it’s all been through using it. Seriously, the usefulness really only hits you after you’ve tried it once. Would love to hear more feedback after you’ve given it a shot if you haven’t already! Thanks again for your thoughts!
So how can your monetize? If I start using this service, are you guys gonna start charging me down the line? And, how will you compete if the telecoms decide to add this feature to their existing users?
Microsoft has an incubation project in this space, as well, just released:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/arch.....-Slam.aspx
Now a days people are going crazy about like these services. But there are several products like this. What is the major advantage of it. Multi…..?
Plazes are actually joining this lot, and I’m helping them alpha test the service. Works well.
There is a very good multi-person SMS service in France : PealGCom
Highly recommende for french users, theyr web service is also very robust
http://www.pealgcom.com
I’ve tried all of these services, and the one that stuck out the most and worked the best was http://peekamo.com.
Nobody has complained to me about sending them a text messages and ending up costing them because they didn’t have a text message plan.
Of the 8 services and all the services others have mentioned none of them have free text where there the recipient doesn’t pay either. In otherwords, the messages were all SMPP based. Now 3Jam was a little different but still too hard to use. Plus by the time I enter all my friend’s names in I only had 50 characters left for my message. On Peekamo I’ve created a group of my friends, then I send the message to all by using my group alias.
I think you should write another article and call it eight impersonal SMS services that others will hate you for and you will kill yourself trying to use them.
Another service that is in a preview mode is ImThere (http://www.imthere.com), a Ramped Media (http://www.ramped.com) project. Currently, self funded.
Ran across a company still in stealth mode called Pointr doing some interesting work that expands on the mobile social networking with location-based services.