Group text messaging weekend startup project
Its 2010 and there still isn’t an ad-free and non-paid way to have many-to-many text messages with a group of people! Almost a year ago I built a script in PHP that leveraged twitter as the middle man to solve this simple problem for my neighborhood buddies; essentially creating a mobile chat room. Just last weekend a few of my industry friends and I decided to sit down and productize the thing as an exersize. Two days, some pizza, and a bit of open source code we had Twitmob.com. Here’s how it works.
Simply create a Twitter account for your group, say @bffs_4_eva, and invite your friends to follow. Then when a follower tweets “@bbfs_4_eva happy hour!”, Twitmob will re-tweet the message. Now all of your other followers will see, “RT @a_follower: happy hour today!”. Once your friends turn on Twitter’s mobile updates for the group you can chat with them anywhere. No smart phone required!
Check out Twitmob.com to see how it works. Its quite simple and only takes a few minutes.
Categories: Computers, Software, Web
Group chat via SMS is a large market opportunity that has been solved in an ideal way as soon as the handset vendor community wakes up. Smashtalk (www.smashtalk.net) is the SMS engine that should have been part of every mobile phone. Smashtalk provides full group text chat without any need for a web site. No need to establish groups ahead of time. No need to load any special application. In fact, Smashtalk supports integration to every SMS application running today and enables all of them to enjoy group text chat. Smashtalk technology is available for licensing by any handset vendor, OS vendor or carrier. If you want to have “universal” group text chat, make some noise with your carrier and handset vendor. Smashtalk is what SMS should have been from day 1 and can be going forward.