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November 29, 2006

Yahoo! Launches Group Texting Site

Natali Del Conte

47 comments »

mixdlogo.jpgYahoo! is getting in on the group text messaging biz with the launch of their new site, Mixd. TechCrunch was tipped off to the site’s existence today but we have not been able to determine how long it has been live.

Mixd allows users to set up groups and text or share photos within those groups. Texts and photos can be managed online as well as on a mobile phone.

mixdscreen.jpgText recipients can reply to all, “whisper” by replying to just one other person, or “mute” by turning off the message chain. But judging from some initial testing, all of those functionalities are not the easiest things to figure out. It’s simple enough to sign up for the service but difficult to manage contacts, groups, and the numbers assigned to groups and commands. Yahoo! tries to simplify things by asking users to text a number instead of a word, which I’m not sure makes things simpler.

It looks like Yahoo! is going for the “cool” angle on this one. The “About” page says, “Mixd is about going out. Coordinate last-minute meetups, share pictures and videos from your phone, and remember last night on a website we create for you, automatically.”

We have had our eye on several group SMS services lately such as Zemble, Dodgeball, and Twitter. It is a little surprising that Yahoo! wants in on this game but then again, why not?

So far this service is only available to US phone numbers. Regular text messaging fees apply.

Thanks to Noah Kagan to tipping us off about this new site.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Kevin Burton

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Mmmmmmmmm.. Delicious Peanut Butter…….

  2. Denver Wang

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:35 pm

    yup, this is the peanut..worry about the spam sms incase of someone put me into their mixer…

  3. NeoTechie

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Collective intelligence rocks!

  4. Steve

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:16 pm

    When are these companies going to realize that this type of service is only going to catch on in trendy metro areas like San Francisco? This is not a very practical tool to use for the average person.

  5. Jon Gales

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:50 pm

    Seems interesting, but it’s not letting me sign up. I’m getting an error message texted back, “access denied”. From the website it looks like a combination of Twitter and 3jam.

    Steve: There are a lot of people that text message and don’t happen to live in hip metro areas like SF. Maybe not in your group of friends, but the point still stands. Usage probably tilts on the young side, but that’s where these services are focusing. I’m wouldn’t even try to convince someone over 30 the advantages of Twitter. It’s a losing battle.

  6. Jason

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:52 pm

    You’re an idiot Steve. This service is perfect for a kid in middle america that has 5 friends that he wants to meet at the 7-Eleven at 8pm. Or, it’s perfect if Jimmy just broke up with Jenny and you want to alert your 4 girlfriends.
    The only issue is penetrating the PIM and finding people to use it. I think Social Networking seems like a perfect place to launch tech. like this.

  7. Bob Dobbs

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:57 pm

    Jon: I’m guessing you’re a T-Mobile user. Try it out with 92999 instead of 445566, if so.

    I think this is going to be outstandingly useful to far-flung families and business travelers, as well as the college kids.

  8. Travis Farnes

    November 29th, 2006 at 3:10 pm

    I got the same “access denied” message and I am a T-Moible user. I did not see anything about the number 92999 on the site though. Did I miss it?

  9. Drama 2.0

    November 29th, 2006 at 3:56 pm

    Damn. Hope Zemble locked up that VC funding they were “open” to right after their TechCrunch article a couple of days ago. Looks like they won’t be getting acquired by Yahoo anytime soon and Google already made their move a while ago.

  10. cg

    November 29th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

    Hey Jason the idiot. You can do all of those things on Facebook. NewsFeed is used for that purpose, when someone breaks up, every other friend knows it.

    This site is dumb, if I want to meet with some friends at the last minute, 99% of the time I am already on the go, not at a computer.

  11. gazzle

    November 29th, 2006 at 4:22 pm

    @Kevin: That is LOL funny.

  12. Steve

    November 29th, 2006 at 4:26 pm

    ummm, texting is for cell phones, thats the whole point.

    Group text communication is only one of the uses for a platform like this. It could be used to send maps, search results, music recommendations to affinity groups or even to your own various devices/interfaces (Make this map available on my phone, email, and car nav system).

  13. pablo

    November 29th, 2006 at 5:06 pm

    Um, I don’t know about everyone else but my phone lets me send out the same text message to as many people as I want.

  14. Jordan

    November 29th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    As previously commented, Microsoft has a research prototype along these lines as well. We recently posted a video demonstrating how it’s used. I find it amusing.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/arch.....video.aspx

  15. S.S. Hoffman

    November 29th, 2006 at 5:55 pm

    Looks like Yahoo! wants to get in the game with Google.

    The thing about Google is that they don’t try to make it hip. They just try to make it simple. Actually, simple is hip. Everyone will gravitate towards the simplest solution. Peanutbutter or not, this is something Yahoo! has to understand.

    The Hoff
    http://www.zannel.com

  16. Jason

    November 29th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

    Geeze… this site is a spammer’s dream come true! (and my nightmare realized!) It doesn’t require any confirmation before it allows someone to send me a text message, then anyone else they add to the group can start spamming me with messages too!

    I much prefer zemble’s approach (www.zemble.com): It makes sure users are friends before it allows them to text each other, protecting everyone from ever getting spam.

    I just don’t see how TechCrunch’s new girl Natali could review Zemble, calling it spam and not even raise concern with this!

  17. Dave McClure

    November 29th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    hmm… i think the valuation for Twitter just went up 5-10x :)

    over/under at $25M right now, maybe?

  18. Kevin Burton

    November 29th, 2006 at 7:52 pm

    Dave. Good point! Maybe Twitter should take a VC round!

  19. Wes

    November 29th, 2006 at 8:27 pm

    Some people could find the service useful but otherwise it could be better to use a mobile phone that sends multiple messages.

  20. People Finder

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:03 pm

    Yet another diversion for Yahoo!

  21. Roy Tahsin

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    Thats awesome, because I could never just select the friends I want to mass message from my phonebook, now it will only take me a few extra steps to do just about the same thing…thanks Yahoo!

  22. mario64

    November 30th, 2006 at 12:43 am

    is this service exclusive to US residents or open to the world?

  23. Minger

    November 30th, 2006 at 12:56 am

    I couldn’t figure out how to send a message to a mixd. I keep getting messages back with numbered mixds. What am I supposed to do with them to get the message out?

    3Jam has it figured out much better. 3Jam has had the benefit of more time to work the kinks out. However, it’s not rocket science and both are merely trying to adapt the IRC model to SMS. I say Yahoo should take 3Jam out for $1 mil. win/win. Once Yahoo gets the kinks out and puts the big user base behind it, nobody doing anything similar will be left standing anyway.

    Microsoft SLAM is a winner but that’s like years out as we wait for cheaper Smartphone implementations.

  24. chris johns

    November 30th, 2006 at 1:57 am

    It’s incredibly customer unfocused in that it doesn’t say what countries it works in - I tried in the UK and of course, it doesn’t work, though Flickr and Yahoo are very popular here.

    A simple US only on the home page would suffice…

  25. Jon Gales

    November 30th, 2006 at 2:18 am

    To the couple of above people who noted their phones can send messages to multiple parties… Duh. That’s not new. The new part is being able to reply to the group. There is no reply to all in SMS. You don’t even know if the message is unique to you or not (there is no way to see who else it was sent to). That’s basically what 3jam does, mixd throws in a few more twists.

    It’s not super complicated, which is [if there is one] the selling point. Personally I dig that there are no hoops to jump through. I shouldn’t need to approve people to be able to text me. Anyone can already text me–it’s a phone number. There’s a niche target market here, youngish people who go out a lot and meet lots of new people.

  26. Tracy

    November 30th, 2006 at 7:16 am

    Don’t forget Joopz! Does group text messaging….and more!
    http://www.joopz.com

  27. tomo

    November 30th, 2006 at 8:19 am

    with the pay per msg model of many wireless providers by joining participating in the sms social network/blog services you will see your # of txt msgs skyrocket while your phone bill does the same.

  28. New Data Recovery

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:33 am

    Mobile markets are very different from country to country, with own rules, carriers and fee.

    The real evolution will be when every single mobile phone will be connected in wi-fi or with flat gprs/umts so everyone will use mobile phone as a “always in the hand” small laptop.

  29. Dale Harvey

    December 7th, 2006 at 3:37 am

    This seems to be a pretty big market that seems to have a lot of
    potential, but it seems even the big players are having a hard time
    really breaking into the market

    there is a uk company offering a similiar service, http://vixo.com , that
    is an ‘opt in’ group messaging, which would seem the most effective
    to block spam

  30. DS

    December 21st, 2006 at 4:59 pm

    I have a quick question that I just don’t understand about these services. Does 3Jam and Yahoo get charged for every message that is sent? I’ve worked at a mobile company in a past life; to send SMSs’, we would have to go through a gateway provider who would charge us $0.025 per SMS sent. If this is the case with 3Jam and Yahoo, then the charges would add up. Right? Am I missing something here? I know companies can go through SMTP gateways versus SMSC and not be charged, but I can’t tell if that is what 3Jam and Yahoo Mixd are doing.

    Thanks to anyone who can answer.

  31. win

    January 6th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    Boy, this is some high-class site

  32. gambling

    January 6th, 2007 at 12:23 pm

    Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.

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    January 24th, 2007 at 11:11 am

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  34. Praveen Rajan

    February 28th, 2007 at 12:02 am

    It’s gone away! Wonder whether they’re making a comeback in a new form.

    Just visited the site, and got this message:

    —
    Mixd is going away, for now.

    The Mixd pilot study ended on February 25th, and the service will no longer be available. We’ve learned a lot from here, and you can expect to see more great mobile products from Yahoo! in the future.

    Thanks for your participation in Mixd. For more mobile, check out Yahoo! Mobile.
    —

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