Intuit’s new product Txtweb promises to redefine how we interact with sms apps. Be it cricket score or wikipedia, its a powerful way to get information and interact with smart apps. Yes I feel like a dinosaur to learn about this only when pinged by txtweb to demo the service to us and we are pretty sure that this would catch up with the other biggies in SMS world shortly.
While we spend a hell lot of time speaking about mobile internet and mobile apps, the fact remains that we have 700 million SMS ready mobile connections in India and roughly 70 million internet users in all! And our love of text messages / forwards is well known already.
Txtweb works on a long code number “9243342000” in India (they also have International numbers, but the service is currently targeted in India) and that has its own advantages and disadvantages. To begin with, bid goodbye to special SMS charges. This would cost you a regular national SMS (local in Bangalore) and that means the interactions goes up many folds (potentially).
Txtweb supports links within a sms just like we have on the web. So you can browse Wikipedia on txtweb and reply back with single letters like ‘a’ ‘b’ … ‘z’ to click links within the wikipedia article that arrives. A single sms from txtweb can be as long as 960 characters (6 regular sms messages). And a good example of how the service works is perhaps the wikipedia app itself.
Try texting @wikipedia<space><any thing you want to search> to 9243342000. And you can start multiple sessions with multiple apps and keep up you sessions as the links are dynamically generated alphabets. So incase you are already using ‘A’-‘H’ on Wikipedia app, the next app would give you options ‘I’ onwards to interact with that app.
One thing that impresses us about txtweb is the privacy feature. Developers are not allowed to advertise in the app / sms sent and at the same time your phone number is send to the developer in a unique encrypted form. Thus saving you from potential spamming. But not having a premium sms that can get revenue share (no matter how small the cut from the operators is), kills a lot of developer dreams of monetizing services easily. But if we look at the larger picture, txtweb is building an ecosystem and there can be monetization opportunities like an app store for them (and the developers as well). For now, stay tuned for the @onlygizmos app on txtweb. (See all apps live on Txtweb.com)
Ps: Do check the cool Chrome extension that you can use for Txtweb.
