Yahoo planning email 2 sms feature
It is well known now that India is a much more mobile savvy country with more than 185 million mobile subscribers growing at almost 6-7 million a month while its internet population is pegged at a debatable 38.5 million by IAMAI.
Similar trends are seen in other countries as well. So its not surprising that startup internet players are looking at mobile distribution for their web services. Now it seems the same is catching on with the big boys as well. This article states that yahoo is looking to launch a email to sms feature which would allow users of yahoo to send messages their friends phone right from their mail box.
The text-messaging feature will be initially available to Yahoo Mail members in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. In order to text a friend, users simply enter a mobile phone number, type a text message in Yahoo Mail and hit send.
This feature shows the importance of mobile component for a web player. It also shows that going forward we can only expect more traction in the mobile space with respect to internet players.
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Please change the description of Watblog , replace the word "articles" with 'news,gibberish,breakouts" or something like that.
Read this carefully to understand what I mean -http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html
Cheers,
Rohit
Have made the change Rohit.. thanks for the feedback
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@ Estranged: Have you ever noticed that all the articles in newspapers and magazines are not of the same length and do not carry the same amount of analysis and research? All TV Channels do not cover every news item for the same amount of time? All Press Releases from companies are not of the same length?
Similarly I feel a blog cannot have just the same kind of articles. I think WATblog is doing a great job and if they keep serving the same kinds of articles, it will just get boring for us readers.
Yahoo’s Free SMS from eMail – Marketing gimmick?
Yahoo’s new feature announcement of allowing users to send free sms from eMail looks like a plain marketing gimmick rather than an actual innovation. Yahoo has termed it as an enhanced social email experience. But let’s take a deeper look and understand this in detail.
The integration eMail and messenger makes sense as it allows users to keep in touch without having to bother about loading an additional application and chat within the same window, but extending it to mobile for sms is fundamentally flawed. If you analyze the usage experience of heavy internet users, the applications used for communication amongst the peer group or the social group is actually moved from eMail to scraps and IM. Heavy users primarily use email for sending attachments and not for short messages.
Now short messages or sms which are meant for mobile phones are more suited to be integrated with Instant messenger or scraps which allow you to have two way communications and are meant for sharing short messages which rank the highest in usage amongst heavy users. But using eMail to send SMS which is only one way is not a very convenient way to communicate.
Yahoo may find very few people who will actually buy this new feature as innovation for the reasons stated above. This looks more like a desperate move from yahoo rather than innovaton. Besides this Rediff has been offering free sms through its messenger for a long time now and this facility is also available through eMail but its charged. Obviously Rediff guys have their fundamentals right because any users who wants to use free sms will use IM as the task is more suited for the application, rather than eMail unless there is a specific need for which Rediff is charging.
Additionally Rediff was also the first player to announce unlimited storage on eMail and Yahoo followed them. I think Yahoo can learn a lot of lessons from Indian companies who are giving them a tough fight and should quickly get their act together and end playing the marketing gimmicks.