One-To-Many Text Messaging: How Soon Is Now?
I’m an iPhone geek. I was the third LaunchSquad team member to get an iPhone, and I evangelized it until three more colleagues and my wife bought their own. Obviously, I was delighted when I read (on my phone, natch) in the Gearlive blog this morning that the new update of the phone’s operating system will contain one-to-many text messaging. A lot of brands have tried to create one-to-many and swarm-like many-to-many text messaging solutions, but few have seen mainstream success.
Many a business model has been built on the premise of solving the one-to-many text message problem. 3Jam and NetworkText have tried to solve this problem head-on, and rock brands and corporate brands have also done innovative stuff with text-messaging on the Mozes platform.
If you’re wondering about the usefulness of one-to-many text messaging, consider the following scenarios:
1. Four friends are going to meet at an Italian restaurant. One arrives early, and realizes the restaurant is closed, and wants to notify the others quickly, so they can coordinate an alternative plan.
2. The location for a business meeting is changed at the last minute, and all participants need to be notified, quickly
3. You want to send a message out to a large group of friends (”I just got engaged!”) without putting it in a public space like Twitter, Facebook or Jaiku.
Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook’s newsfeed updates do fulfill a similar function, but I think it’s a pretty big exaggeration to say that adoption of those technologies is widespread. With bloggers predicting that there will be 5 million iPhones sold by the end this month, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that one-to-many text messaging will be a pretty widely deployed technology by the end of the year.
A colleague showed me how he could do this on his Blackberry, but the process involves selecting the recipients individually, and they can’t tell that the message sent to them was sent to multiple recipients. It’s quite possible that RIM may have been the first brand to bring one-to-many texting to a widely deployed device, but I don’t know if they will be the brand to capitalize on this innovation. Maybe consumers will only adopt this technology if it’s really easy (and fun) to use. That’s something that Cupertino figured out about 24 years ago.
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Susan Kuchinskas
Posted on January 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm.
I agree this feature would be fun and useful; I wonder if it will/should be provided by the mobile phone OS or as a third-party app. Remember the bad old days of cell phones, when you could only send SMS to people who used the same carrier? Would this be the case with the iPhone?
It seems that it might be easier to use group messaging as part of another social networking tool, where you already had your buddies/groups etc. set up.