If you want to save some extra money and you don't need Google Voice to forward any of your SMS messages to your phone because you're at your computer anyway, make sure you turn off SMS forwarding under Settings -> Phones -> Edit.

While Google Voice is still an invite-only service, Google is slowly opening the service up to more users. Apple, of course, is still 'reviewing' whether it will allow the Google Voice iPhone app into the App Store, but there can be no doubt that Google Voice has the potential to drive some revenue away from cell phone carriers. International calls are cheap, transcribed voicemails that are forwarded to your email are free, you can easily record calls, and you don't need to pay for SMS messages you receive. Over time, Google will surely add a few more features to Google Voice (and maybe bring back some features it dropped from GrandCentral's original feature set). Users still have to connect calls through the cell phone carriers' traditional phone network, but that's about the only service a user would need from AT&T and Co (besides a data plan, of course).

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?

Just for Uganda at First

Even though Google stresses that it targets 'Africa' with these services, in reality, they are only available for users on MTN Uganda's network, but chances are that, if successful, Google will expand these offerings in the future.

Google worked together with MTN Uganda, the Grameen Foundation's "AppLab," and a number of other local partners to get this service off the ground.

Fighting Information Poverty

In a post on the Google Africa blog about this launch, Rachel Payne, Google's Country Manager in Uganda points out that the company believes that "it's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need most, and in areas with the greatest information poverty." It will be interesting to see how (and if) local users will make use of these new services.

SMS Tips

Among these new services, Google SMS and Google Trader are very interesting and will definitely be quite useful for a lot of users. Google SMS Tips seems to be the most sophisticated of these services, as it interprets search queries and doesn't just return a list of links, but actually tries to compute the query and return a relevant answer to a question. For now, SMS Tips works best with health questions and queries related to farming (including weather information). Even if you are not in Uganda, you can give the service a try here (query form is at the bottom of the page)

Depending on whether agencies in a selected location are participating (currently, nearly 1,000 agencies have signed on since the company's launch in March), users can sign up at the Nixle website to subscribe to emails, web alerts, and text messages about community issues from tornado watches and traffic accidents to local robberies and fugitives on the loose. Nixle moreover provides a painless way for local agencies to transition into modern times and notify community members of critical details in ways that will have an immediate impact.

Users can add as many locations as they like to receive alerts for different areas; for example, I know of several female relatives who would be more than happy to know of police alerts in the various towns I travel to and worry/overreact accordingly.

Users can also choose which kinds of alerts to receive and what on medium they prefer to receive them.

Nixle claims to be the first authenticated, secure service for connecting municipal agencies and community organizations to residents in real time. It uses the Google Maps API to determine and display location and proximity. The company is privately funded and its services are free to all governments, government agencies and organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and end users.

As geographic location and proximity become more and more relevant to users and the wealth of information about locations increases, applications such as Nixle seem like the next logical step in law enforcement and public safety. It's great that these alerts are available in real time; it would also be great to see a Brightkite-esque "check-in" process made available for users. For example, if I'm at a friend's house and a store down the street is robbed, it would be great to have the information and know to stay safely inside for a little while.

Then again, real-time availability of information is just as useful as location-based information, particularly when issues of public safety are involved.

What do our readers think? Is a real-time, geo-specific alert system the future of law enforcement? Or is it creepy, Big Brother, Minority Report territory?

When going out to eat, there's nothing worse than being told the wait time is 45 - 60 minutes and the restaurant is so over-crowded with customers that you can't even make your way to the bar. Unfortunately, the only choice customers have today is to crowd in and bear it since the paging systems used by restaurants have such a limited range. This is especially trying when you're at a restaurant that's in a mall plaza where other shops, bars, or coffeehouses are only steps away. But instead of being able to kill time in the bookstore, for example, customers have to wait, bored and crowded, in the restaurant's entry way.

ReadyPing solves this problem and does so without the need for restaurants to invest in additional hardware or software. Instead, the system allows for text messages to be sent to the waiting dinner guests. To use the system, a host or hostess enters in the party's name, number of guests, and a mobile number. When a table becomes available, the host clicks a button to send out a customized text message.

The cost of using the system is a flat $34.95 per month for unlimited messaging and there are no setup fees. At the moment, ReadyPing is U.S.-only, but there's no reason why they couldn't expand to other parts of the world at a later point.

Potential Issues

There is a potential drawback to using a system like this - and that's the restaurant customers themselves. Given free range, people will likely wander off much farther away from the restaurant than before and that could delay the time between the text's delivery and their return by several minutes, possibly even five or ten. This would dramatically slow down the seating process and would frustrate those on the list behind them.

Before a restaurant implemented such a system as this, it would be necessary to retrain hosting staff so they understood the potential issues. Perhaps instead of waiting until a table was actually ready before alerts were sent, ReadyPing users could anticipate ahead of time that a table was about to become ready. This would give customers the additional time needed to return to the restaurant from wherever they had ventured off to. Perhaps staff could even work out a system where awaiting customers were pinged as current customers were brought their checks. Further integration with restaurant POS systems to do so would be even better, but something like that may be beyond ReadyPing's capabilities.

Another potential drawback to ReadyPing is that some customers would be hesitant to give out their phone number, despite assurances that data is secured. For those customers, backup pagers may still need to be used or they may need to wait the old-fashioned way - listening for the hostess to call their name aloud.

Real-World Mobile Technology

In any event, the ReadyPing system is a great example of an application that solves a real-world problem which so many of us can relate to. Thanks to mobile technology, we expect to see more everyday, useful solutions like this in the near future.

By default, Twe2 will send you an SMS whenever you receive a direct message or a reply. In order to finance this service, Twe2 appends a short ad to all of its SMS messages.

Twe2, whose developers are also responsible for the popular FriendDeck app, has added a number of interesting features to its service that Twitter itself never offered. You can, for example, use the service to receive a message whenever a certain keyword appears in your stream, and you can even use relatively complex search queries.

In order to keep your Twitter SMS stream manageable, Twe2 lets you set the notification frequency (up to 100 messages per hour), and you can also specify if you only want Twe2 to send you messages at specific times during the day or only on certain days of the week.

Thanks to these features, Twe2 is even an interesting service for those of us who live in countries where Twitter's own SMS service is still available. Twe2 also promises that users in the U.S. will get a few extra features in order to distinguish the service from Twitter's own SMS updates.

One problem with Twe2, however, is that the service doesn't have access to Twitter's firehose feed, so that it can often take a while before it notices a new message and forwards it to you.

OAuth Coming Soon

Twe2 was approved by Twitter to test the company's forthcoming support oAuth, though this is not available yet. For now, you still have to provide Twe2 with your Twitter login and password.

Find Us on Twitter

If you'd like to befriend the ReadWriteWeb staff on Twitter here are our accounts - we'd love to meet you too!

In parts of Africa, there simply is no mobile internet access available...but there is the ability to send SMS. Enter Mobile-XL. With their browser's graphical, easy-to-use interface, people with limited or no internet access finally have an entry point to vast resources of the web. The application, which works on Java-based phones with either GPRS or Bluetooth functionality, provides access to news, weather, flight status, package tracking, dictionary, thesaurus, translations, local 411, games, music, access to email, and more.

The XLBrowser doesn't have to be pre-installed on handsets in order for people to use it. If customers have a GPRS-enabled phone, they can text "XLB" to 3663 (for Kenya) or 7197 (for Uganda) or 3112 (for Tanzania). However, they will need a Bluetooth-activated PC or laptop to store the file that's downloaded from the link. The file then needs to be transferred to the handset using Bluetooth. For obvious reasons, having phones which are already equipped with the browser will give more people access to the mobile web, especially in places where PCs and laptops are hard to come by.

Says Guy Kamgaing-Kouam, CEO of Mobile-XL, "we're taking a gigantic step toward realizing our mission of bridging the digital divide." His company has been working since 2005 to develop a simple and affordable technology that could bring internet services to the underserved markets of the world.

The new partnership agreement between Nokia and Mobile-XL will deliver the XLBrowser in phones initially shipped to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania as early as March 2009.

Kwiry - an SMS-based service designed to simplify mobile tasks - has just announced a feature that plays right into that mindset: allowing you to control your TiVo remotely via SMS.

To date, your best option was sprinting to the nearest laptop with wireless access to use the TiVo Web interface or using your mobile browser to hit the TiVo mobile site - if you had enough connectivity. But browsing the Web from even the best mobile device is relatively data-intensive - and therefore time-consuming - when compared to sending a text message.

With Kwiry, saving that show is as simple as sending a text. Once you're signed up for Kwiry and configured the service, simply text the keyword "tivo" plus the name of the program - like, say, Flight of the Conchords - to 59479. That's it. You're done. Kwiry will add it to your TiVo shows. It's hard to imagine controlling TiVo from afar could be any easier - save for an Internet Brain Implant.

Texting your TiVo is only one of the features of this release. The new version of Kwiry also introduces the ability to access Yelp reviews and send your virtual business card to an email contact, all using simple text messages. The service has also integrated Facebook Connect, enabling users to share Kwiry data with their friends on Facebook - and allowing new users to easily establish accounts using their Facebook credentials.

These new features join a gamut of functionality already available in the service. And they sit quite nicely alongside features like adding movies to your Netflix queue and products to your Amazon Wish List.

As someone who is often on the move and who has come to rely on Evernote as a second brain, I see this type of immediate access to - and control of - services from a mobile handset extremely appealing. Not to mention that, with the ever increasing speed of our lives, having the ability to get small things done when and where you can is often the key to remaining sane. Kwiry appears to be adding a number of features that promise that grasp on sanity will remain strong.

Kwiry is a free service, although your carrier's typical SMS charges apply. To test drive the beta TiVo service or any of the other services offered, visit Kwiry.

Now, you may have the option to rectify that situation with a new Gmail Labs feature that adds SMS messaging to Gmail chat.

How do you use it? After activating the feature through Google Labs, simply establish a mobile phone number for the contact with whom you want to exchange SMS messages. And begin firing messages their way.

The mobile user will receive a message from a unique phone number beginning with the 406 area code. So they'll be able to save it to their contacts and send you messages in the future. If they don't want to be getting messages from you, they have the option to block them.

With the new feature, you'll be able to continue conversations with people who have left their computer mid-conversation. What's more, the next time you get an inbound SMS message while you're sitting in front of your machine, you'll also be able to jump into Gmail chat to converse using your full keyboard - instead of your mobile. And that may mean a more meaningful conversation for both of you.

The college reached this decision after first looking into outsourcing their email to the cloud. They considered offering from both Google and Microsoft, but eventually decided against both in lieu of the new forwarding option.

A Smart Decision

While the Boston College decision may have been made for cost-saving reasons more than anything, we can easily imagine this as being the start of a new trend.

Can you even imagine a U.S. college student who didn't have an email address of their own by the time they were a freshman? It's practically unheard of. Today's students are digital natives who have been immersed in technology from the day they were born. It simply doesn't make sense to give them yet another account to manage when they enter college.

Some Challenges

By going this route, there are still some challenges to overcome, though. For example, a student who changes their email carrier will probably forget to alert the institution to the change and could then miss out on important messages from the university pertaining to their courses, scholarship, and disciplinary and/or safety information.

However, it can easily be argued that a change of (email) address is a student's responsibility to handle, not the institution's. If a student changed their address or phone number, would they not alert the affected parties? The same should hold true for email. And if the end result is more efficient and effective communication with the student body as a whole, the outliers who didn't follow through on managing their email transition are ultimately the ones at fault for any missed messages.

The only danger in drawing a hard line like that would be if the college or university was in the habit of sending out critical safety information utilizing the students' email addresses. If that was the institution's main way of communicating this urgent info, they may want to devise another solution. Urgent messages should ideally be sent out using multiple pathways: email, IM, text messages, and, these days, Twitter alerts would also be a valuable tool to use, too. In fact, Omnilert's e2Campus emergency notification system  already integrates with Twitter and Facebook as well as email, SMS, and RSS.

In the end, we think the decision Boston College made could easily be the start of a new trend, especially for smaller institutions looking to reduce I.T. infrastructure and support costs. We're sure the students like it, too.

Last week, in conjunction with the PopTech! conference, the Praekelt Foundation and partner organizations announced a new effort that will use the power of mobile messaging to help fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in South Africa. Project Masiluleke will utilize the power of the mobile phones as a low-cost way to deliver health-related information and prompt call-ins to call centers for those affected by these health care crises.

As discussed here and elsewhere before, South Africa is a country with an amazingly high mobile phone adoption rate - around 90%. Unfortunately, South Africa is also a country that has around 1000 HIV/AIDS related deaths ever day. Project Masiluleke, which means "to give wise council" or "lend a helping hand" in Zulu, aims to use the mobile phone as a communication conduit between doctor's visits. The project's intent is to bring those with HIV and TB into the healthcare system earlier, when the diseases can be most effectively treated and/or slowed.

Project M, as it's being called, consists of four major components.

Drawing Perspective Patients In

First, the team behind Project M will use "Please Call Me" (PCM) messages to prompt citizens to call into a HIV/AIDS call center. Trained call center operators will provide healthcare information, counseling, and referrals to local testing clinics. Please Call Me messages are a wildly-popular SMS-like message that prompt a party to call the requesting party. PCM messages are used heavily in South Africa, roughly 25 million PCM messages are sent every day. PCM messages will be adapted by the Project M team to deliver advertisements prompting recipients to call into HIV/AIDS call centers if they are in need of health-related resources.

In the second part of the project, the Project M team will use TxtAlert, a text messaging reminder system developed by Praekelt Foundation, to send out SMS messages to remind patients of upcoming clinic visits. As it stands, only 10% of South Africans with AIDS are actively receiving anti-retroviral therapy. TxtAlert will help remind patients who are enrolled in these therapy programs to attend their visits, enhancing their care.

Reaching Out, Mobily

As a third part of Project M, a virtual call center will be initiated and built. Existing AIDS/HIV helplines will be enhanced by using teams of highly trained and committed HIV+ patients. This group of peer counselors will be made up of "gold star" patients who are knowledgeable about their about their illness and are committed to providing high-quality advice and guidance to those who are dealing with the emotional weight of an HIV diagnosis. The peer counselors will be selected and trained by NGO and government officials.

The virtual call center counselors will be available via mobile phone and will field questions remotely. Not only will the virtual call center create thousands of jobs, but those who call into the call center will be connected with a nurturing voice to help console and distribute quality information.

The fourth and final piece of Project M involves at-home HIV testing with mobile support. Unfortunately, with such a high population of HIV infected persons, the South African healthcare system isn't fully capable of handle the tremendous load. Also, South Africans who may be HIV positive avoid the lines to get tested because of the stigma of being seen in line.

To help battle this, the Project M team will employ mobile testing stations that can conduct the blood test in one's home, giving them privacy. Trained councilors will also be on hand to administer guidance and advice in case it is needed. The concept of an at-home test has been well received by the South African government and healthcare officials. A mobile testing solution would be welcome in rural areas where the testing resources are most needed.

Lots of Players Involved

The team behind Project M is made up of various organizations including businesses, NGOs and government agencies. The major players include the Praekelt Foundation, mobile network operator MTN, design firm frog design, National Geographic, and NGOs such as LifeLine Southern African and World-Class Advisors.

So Much At Stake

There is no doubt that the mobile phone represents a huge opportunity to disseminate information to huge groups of people quickly and cheaply. It is refreshing to see so many organizations involved with Project M including mobile network operators, mobile technology firms, NGOs and government officials, all united to help potential victims of dreaded diseases.

This time of effort and coordination, if applied to more social causes, would bring tangible change in many areas of need. We send kudos to Project Masiluleke and we will continue to track the progress of the project on an ongoing basis.

The series is based on a conversation I had with Gustav Praekelt, a mobile entrepreneur located in South Africa. In this post we explore how mobile technology is being used for social good in Africa. See also Part 1 here.

The Mobile Phone's Expansive Reach and The Massive Outreach Opportunity

Africa is an expansive and growing mobile market. With 300 million mobile accounts and more being added each day, the mobile phone presents a far-reaching outreach opportunity for marketers. However, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are also excited at the possibility of being able to send messages to 300 million people at the push of a button.

The Praekelt Foundation, a charitable outreach of Praekelt Consulting , is taking their knowledge of web and mobile technologies and finding ways to help Africa's needy. The Foundation finds, attracts, and incubates projects to reach out to Africa's under-served populations. Praekelt Foundation's current projects are all health-focused, but the organization is actively seeking other avenues to assist Africa's Mobile-based under-served people.

SocialTxt

SocialTxt is a project that utilizes Please Call Me (PCM) systems. To understand what a PCM message is, one must look at the nature of the African mobile market. In North America, the vast majority of cell phone customers pay on a postpaid basis, meaning most of us pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of minutes. However in Africa, the opposite as true, roughly 85-90% of customers utilize pre-paid SIMs to make and receive mobile phone service. In some African countries like Nigeria, pre-paid customers account for as much as 95% of the mobile market.

In these pre-paid dominant markets, when you run out of call credit, you can't make outgoing calls or SMS messages. To get someone to call you, you might ring them once or beep them. To respond to all this traffic generated on the mobile phone network, mobile network operators invented Please Call Me messages as a way to prompt your friends or family to call you back. A Please Call Me message is merely a SMS-like message that prompts the recipient to call the number of the requester. The PCM messages are free to send for mobile customers, up to 6 per day.

PCM messages are extremely popular in South Africa, of which 30 million messages are sent a day in a country with a population of around 47 million people.

PCM messages, in recent years, have been used by advertisers and marketers as a vehicle for marketing. Praekelt and his colleagues saw the PCM system as a tool for social change. The Praekelt Foundation thereby approached a network operator about a year ago and convinced the company to work with the Foundation to conduct a trial of positive social impact advertising.

The PCM message offers 120 characters that the Foudation and it's partners to utilize. For example, a message can be sent to encourage the recipient to call an HIV call center or medical center. The messages fill a need, as Praekelt said, "This is not fancy technology and most of the PCM message users are at the bottom of the social economic chain. These are people who don't have TV's, so programs such as SocialTxt give companies and groups a great way to reach these previously un-reachable portions of the population."

To enhance the PCM message, Praekelt Foundation, in partnership with health-focused NGOs, can insert a WAP link to a mobile website or a phone number to an interactive voice response system allowing for further health-related information to reach HIV-stricken patients.

With SocialTxt, the Praekelt Foundation has teamed up with partners such as the national HIV/AIDS Call Centeres, People Opposing Women Abuse, Netcare/Vodocom Cleft Lip Campaign, and Khomanani Zithande Campaign.

TxtAlert

HIV/AIDS is a health epidemic at the forefront of Africa's focus for health outreach. Of 33 million people in the world who are HIV Positive, 22 million of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of those 22 million, 5 million are in South Africa alone. This means, as Praekelt points out, that roughly 10% of the world's HIV-positive population lives in South Africa.

TxtAlert is a project that uses SMS messages to remind HIV patients to go to the health clinic for their next visit. In addition to notifying patients of the upcoming appointments, TxtAlert also requests them to reschedule if they are unable to attend. These efforts are aimed at keeping patients engaged in their treatment programs and to deter them from discontinuing their HIV/AIDS treatment programs.

The Praekelt Foundation's research found that even though most of the partner clinic's patients were jobless, more than 90% of these patients have at least one working cell phone in their household. Naturally, SMS is a viable communication method in such a situation.

In addition to prompting patients to attend their appointments, TxtAlert is being used by health clinics to incentivize those who come to the clinic as well. After a patient attends an appointment, TxtAlert will send the patient a text saying "Thank you for coming to the clinic, remember your next appointment is coming up on ". The patient will then receive a reminder text 90 days before the appointment, 2 weeks prior and so on. Well performing patients get free airtime and cell phones as incentives for coming in.

The Praekelt Foundation and partner clinics are experiencing favorable results with SocialTxt. On average, a typical clinic will have a 15% no-show rate for patient appointments. However, when a clinic utilizes SocialTxt, those rates drop to around 3%.

Praekelt points out that a great factor about SocialTxt is that deploying the system doesn't require vast amounts of capital and infrastructure. The main building block is an electronic patient record system and the rest is done behind the scenes by the TxtAlert software. The system is highly scalable as usage and needs rise. The Praekelt Foundation is currently working with a pilot clinic with about 10,000 users on the system. However, they are adding more clinics and will soon be up to 120,000 users on the SocialTxt system.

A third project utilizing SocialTxt will be unveiled at the Pop!Tech conference in October. Pop!Tech gave funding to the Praekelt Foundation to send out thousands of PCM messages regarding HIV/AIDs education.

Mobilisr

Mobile messaging is a far-reaching conduit for reaching a mass audience. The Praekelt Foundation, along with co-lead organization Cell-Life, is working to build an open source, high speed and highly reliable mobile messaging platform called Mobilisr.

Mobilisr could be used for health-related outreach, but also be used by governments and public-safety organizations to send out messages relating to: human rights monitoring, elections monitoring, emergency alerts, conducting public surveys, or could even be used by a group to organize protests.

Prakelt also told me that Mobilisr is enabling customers to conduct SMS voting (much like American Idol's text messaging voting system). The problem with the existing SMS voting systems, as he explains, is that they are built on proprietary systems. Te Prakelt Foundation is working with NGO's (such as Cell-Life) to build SMS based pledge lines and incentive systems built upon WAP sites.

Mobilisr just launched on October 1st. It will be interesting to see how the technology is employed by NGOs and other groups for social good.

Conclusion

With mobile phone technology spreading so rapidly across the African continent, there are many opportunities to reach out to Africa's under-served population. Any vehicle that offers access to the population should be exploited. It's a shame that many people in these groups are being ignored, even though many of them have mobile phones.

It is great to see organizations such as the Praekelt Foundation working with mobile network operators, health clinics, and NGOs to connect Africa's under-served population with the care and services they need to be happy, informed, and perhaps more healthy.

About The Author

Photo: Paul Watson

After signing up for the Alerts.com service, you can choose from all sorts of pre-configured alerts. For example, the site offers alerts for things like news, weather, gas prices, flight info, price watches, CraigsList, sports scores, press releases, birthday reminders, horoscopes, Amber Alerts, and so much more.

However, what really appealed to me was that you had the option to configure your own personalized alerts which could be anything you need to remember to do. I'm also excited to see an RSS Feed Alert option, as well. With this alert, you can monitor feeds for keywords and receive messages immediately or on a scheduled basis via email or SMS.

Types of Alerts

Configuring Alerts

You can see an overview of the different alerts you subscribe to on your personalized homepage, a page which somewhat resembles iGoogle and its gadgets. There's also a handy "list view" which presents the alerts in a list so you can easily sort through them and turn them on or off as desired. This page also displays how many alerts have been sent out so far.

Editing an Alert

Business Model

Alerts.com is an ad-supported service. Specific advertising is inserted into the emails, texts, and voice messages sent out. The ads will be relevant to the type of alert requested by the user. This doesn't seem like a bad deal to get this sort of useful tool for free.

The platform is open and an API is currently available so that developers can create unique reminders, alerts, and notifications of their own.

The company is currently working with other third parties to expand their reach. Through their partnerships with iSAFE.org and AI Life, they will be able to reach out to 16,000 schools and eight million students in the next year.

You can sign up to start receiving your own alerts today, too. Just click here.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/have_the_news_come_to_you_with_alerts.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/have_the_news_come_to_you_with_alerts.php Products Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don't have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don't have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.

We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.

Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile's competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

Starting today, 3jam's new Twitter SMS service will be offered to all users outside the U.S., Canada, and India. However, at the time of launch, they only plan to support the delivery of direct messages. It seems they want to test the waters first - only if there is enough interest will they then look at expanding to include @replies or normal Twitter status updates.

The service will not be free, of course, as none of these new pay-per-tweet services are - you will need to pay for each text you get (replying is free) and you will only receive messages when you have a positive credit balance in your account. The prices will be the same amount per message as a SuperText message to your own country. Standard SMS receiving rates apply (typically free outside of the U.S.).

Is there enough worldwide demand for Twitter via SMS for these pay-for-Twitter services to make it? If you live outside the U.S., Canada, or India, do you have plans to use any of these new SMS services? Let us know in the comments.