3jam offers many of the same core features offered by Google Voice, including the ability to have one phone number ring multiple phones, as well as an online interface for managing voicemail and text messages, though there are some more advanced features that it lacks (more on that later). But it does have a few features that Google Voice doesn’t, like the ability to receive calls on Skype, AOL, and Yahoo Messenger (why waste minutes when you’re sitting in front your your computer anyway?)

3jam also has some impressive SMS functionality, which makes sense given the company’s history with SMS. One of these is a group SMS chat, that lets you designate a new phone number as a ‘group number’ and then pick out which of your contacts is in your group. Every time someone within the group sends a message to that number, it will be sent to everyone else in the group as well. Outsiders can attempt to send messages to the special number, but it won’t have any effect.

3jam is also trying to tackle one of the biggest problems facing Google Voice: number portability, which allows you to transfer your current phone number to the new service. We’ve heard that Google is trying to work out the details to get his feature out the door some time this year, but it poses many logistical problems. For one, users could potentially cancel their carrier contracts on accident, leading to hefty fees. And the wait to get a number transfered from the carrier to the service can take weeks. But that isn’t stopping 3jam. The company is letting users transfer their numbers despite these hurdles, though users will be warned that the process may take as long as 45 days.

So 3jam has some things going for it, but it still lags behind Google Voice in some key areas. 3jam lacks many of Google Voice’s more advanced features, like call filtering options — Google Voice lets you set up lists of users and filter calls accordingly (for example I could send certain people straight to voicemail after 6PM but let my family call me at any time), while 3jam doesn’t offer any similar features. And 3jam costs money, with plans starting at around $5 a month (Google Voice is free for most features).

Of course, the market for this kind of service is huge, so 3jam may have a chance even with Google Voice in the same space, but it still has many obstacles ahead. The concept is still quite novel to most people, and some may resist putting their telephony service in the hands of a startup. And 3Jam is going to have to face the same problems Google has when it tries to bring its service to smartphone handsets, though carriers may be less intimated by a startup than they are of Google.

Despite these challenges, 3jam is off to a fairly good start. The company is offereing a white label product that has been licensed by Peek, a company that makes small mobile communication devices. Now for the bigger challenge: getting normal people to understand and sign up for the service.

For more, check out the site’s presentation here.

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Last week Twitter announced that it had disabled outbound SMS updates for nearly all of its international users because it has been unable to negotiate favorable deals with cellular carriers. Up until this point, Twitter has allowed users to receive incoming SMS messages free of charge, footing a bill that it says amounted to up to $1000 per user, per year. The service will continue operating in the US, India, and Canada (where Twitter has forged deals with carriers), but many international users are being left in the cold.

3Jam, a company that offers a number of SMS-related services, is looking to mimic Twitter’s lost functionality. The site has launched a new Twitter service that will deliver direct messages to users as SMS messages. Note: The link doesn’t work yet, but the company says it will go live some time tonight. At launch, the site will also offer local numbers for users in Australia, Sweden and Germany to respond to.

Unfortunately, the service has a few drawbacks. In order to take advantage of it, users will need to establish 3Jam accounts and maintain a positive balance on the site – you’re paying a small fee to restore something that used to be free. Twitter has considered offering a similar for-pay option to help offset its steep costs, but says it is currently uncomfortable offering a paid service that is notoriously unreliable.

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If you don’t have an all-you-can-eat subscription plan for your mobile phone that includes text messages, those messages can really add up on your bill. Especially if you are a teenager. Or a Twitter addict. Now there is a way to bypass those costly text-message fees when you are online. A new service by 3Jam called SuperText is launching in private beta that detects when you are at your computer and lets you send and receive text messages for free.

The first 100 Techcrunch readers to send an email to cathy[at]3jam[dot]com will get priority invites to the private beta. If you don’t get one, you can sign up here to be put on the waiting list.

Whenever you are logged into the service on your computer, it reroutes text messages sent to your phone so you don’t have to pay for them. And the text messages you send appear to recipients as if you sent them from your phone. It will soon work with 3Jam’s Facebook-to-SMS application as well. CEO Andy Jagoe describes SuperText as “an IM-like experience with SMS on the backend.” When you walk away from your computer or don’t respond after a certain amount of time, the message gets sent as a regular SMS to your phone.

SuperText will join 3Jam’s existing reply-all SMS service that is already used by three million mobile phone subscribers. I recently wrote about Jagoe’s attempt to run test ads on Facebook for SuperText, only to find that the term 3Jam was oddly blocked, along with other terms such as “Myspace” and “Hi5″ (After the post ran, Facebook stopped blocking those terms).

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If you try to buy an ad on Facebook, there are certain words that are taboo. Any ads that contain four-letter words are automatically blocked. So too are ads with the names of competing social networks “MySpace,” “Friendster,” “Hi5,” , or “Orkut.” (Curiously, “Bebo” and “OpenSocial” go through just fine, as does “Microsoft,” “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “AOL”).

Okay, so Facebook doesn’t want to run ads for some of its competitors. But why is 3Jam blocked? The startup offers an SMS service that lets people send multiple text messages at once, and it even has a Facebook app that does the same thing.

CEO Andy Jagoe was befuddled when he tried to create a Facebook ad to test a new product, only to find out that the term “3Jam” was also blocked. (The product actually sounds pretty cool: it will be a way to send and receive text messages for free while you are online, and then route them to your phone when you are offline). Says Jagoe:

It seems crazy to think that they consider us competitive. This is kind of weird. It is like censorship.

It does seem weird. What other startup names or products are blocked by Facebook?

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The new service provides an improved level of text messaging by allowing friends and family to connect by multi-party text-message conversations. The 3jam application is free and requires no subscription, however standard text messaging rates apply.

The launch marks the first time a U.S. mobile operator has launched a multi-party text messaging product. Virgin Mobile USA currently has 4.8 million subscribers.

For 3jam the deal is a competitive advantage in a crowded vertical; having a tie up with a telco is a definite positive that will see many, many more people exposed to their product. See our previous coverage of the space here.

3jam took $4 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates in July 2007.

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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

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