Webaroo (The guys who are into indexing the whole of the web and making it available offline) announced the launch of a group SMS product called SMS GupShup on Tuesday. The service lets a mobile user create a community, invite other users, and post SMSs to all members at once.
SMS is a booming market – especially in India and it would be great to see something like this become successful.
I asked few of my friends to check this out – but surprisingly most of them couldn’t make sense out of it. So let me try and explain how the whole thing works:
- You are a group of 10 friends in School / College / Work.
- You love sending and sharing forwards – but it works out rather expensive to send the same message to 9 other people.
What do you do?
- You start a SMS group at GupShup and get all your friends to join the group.
- Now you send a message to the group code and everyone in the group gets it.
Advantage?
You are charged for a single SMS. Varies from Re 1 to Rs 3, depending on your carrier.
Members of the group will get the messages free of charge.
More details can be found here.
Dis-advantage?
Q. Can your friends in your group send messages too?
A. No. Only you can post to your group.
This is rather silly, but has most probably been done to avoid spam and abuse. This would also encourage each user to have a Group and he can probably keep broadcasting the latest happenings in his life to all his friends, fans and followers.
How can Webaroo afford such a thing? What’s the Revenue model?
Advertisements of course. There main aim will be to get you hooked to the service and later on in the year – your messages will be accompanied with Ads. They are hoping to break even in 12-18 months.
I first came across this service at PaGaLGuY.com. MyToday are the guys powering their mobile community. The cool thing is that everyone in a city group can send a message to everyone belonging to the group. The problem with that is – a lot of spam!
Economic Times had a nice article recently on Mobile Communities.
Other’s providing a similar service and definitely worth checking out are Singapore based BuzzCity with their service: MyGamma
My only complaint: MyToday, BuzzCity and now this SMSGupShup service – none work on my Tata Indicom no. The first one to provide this service on Tata will get extra brownie points!
u had mentioned in sm old blog dat tata gives u 3p msging! dat wud work out cheaper than gupshupping
A Twitter clone ?
It's a good idea, but will the per-sms cost be a major deterrent ?
And is there a web / IM / API based interface for posting / receiving msgs?
@ Pratham: Well it's no ways a Twitter clone currently….but yeah it can be perhaps. Plus in the US a mobile is considerered an accessory to the PC or a Laptop…..here a mobile is often ones sole source of connectivity with people.
@ Deepak: Try manually sending a msg to 20 of your friends
This is like inactiv.com that was demoed at BarCampBangalore on 31st March. Were they a bunch of cool people!!!