Well, well, well what you know? Google India has come up with SMS Channels. The product has great similarities with our own MyToday MOBS and Webaroo’s SMSGupshup. You can create an SMS channel which is a way of sending group SMSs. I guess the specialty of Google has always been the ease and simplicity of user interfaces. The same thing continues here also. You can create your own SMS channel with various options. You can use it to send RSS feeds or send alerts about your blog or alerts about your or send Google news alerts for particular keywords or send alerts about the emails sent on a Google group or the simplest of them all – send a “free” group SMS from the web site.
If I have to compare the 3 services, two of which I have already worked on, there is one big Similarity in all. “DELAYS”!!!! Well, I have sent an SMS on my SMS channel Chikitsak and I still haven't received the SMS on my phone. You could expect it to happen with MyToday or SMSGupshup, given their huge subscriber base. Google has just started, so I expected much less delay than this. But its Google, so its bound to come with some innovative solution to eliminate the latency.
Next thing is the good old search feature which is Google’s trademark :) That's something which I always felt MOBS lacked. It is always good to allow users to search for new groups. I think when some one joins a group SMS site, he wants to know if there are others like him who have started some interesting groups. Gupshup also has this feature of search.
Further comes the SMS policy control. By this, I mean who can join the Channel and who can publish. In this case both Google and MyToday are superior. Both allow the owner to control who can subscribe, i.e whether anyone can join the group or is it invitation. Also the owner has the right to check who can send and cannot send SMS to group. There is small difference here though. Google allows the option that either owner can send or all the users can send. MyToday on the other hand has a flexible approach. Owner can allow all the users to send SMS or only those users he approves. Gupshup being more of Micro Blogging platform allows only the sender to send SMS to all while subscriber can send the SMS to only owner(it was like this when I used to last time, which was 3 months back).
Google allow owners to subscribe to feeds and then receive the feeds as SMS. I am happy to say this feature is already present in MyToday, but I don’t think it is much used. One problem with MyToday Mobs is that since our company is mostly concentrating on the Dailies, the number of Mob messages being dropped in day time is high. So even my own Mobs don’t receive the SMSs when I publish them in the day. Of course, try publishing them in night post 10.30 pm and it will reach the recipients really quickly. And you need not wait till night to actually publish the message in the night. Use can future publish your message. Just set the time of publishing the SMS to the time when you want the SMS to be sent(preferably post 10.30) .
The biggest advantage Google is going to have over us or Webaroo is their existing Advertiser base. Since the two of us are startups we (or shall I say our bosses?) had to work hard to convince advertisers the importance of Mobile media. Google will have an obvious advantage with the trust they have created with their brand name. We ourselves are using Google’s ad sense for our Ads.
Finally, I looking forward to how development of SMS channels proceeds. I want to know whether Google uses the location based approach for Ads and how they find the location for the user.
P. S.: Still no “Chikitsak” SMS from Google :(
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