SendHub Messaging – Remedy or Contagion?

How often do you SMS your friends now? Perhaps, much less, than at least a few years ago, when social media and various messengers weren’t as popular as they are now. In fact, some of us have almost stopped using the SMS phone feature, having changed it to texting in other ways, or just making calls.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that many experts predict the future death of SMS’s, they are still available for usage with individual and business purposes. The latter case can, actually, be rather profitable for the company; otherwise I wouldn’t really notice the reasons, why the new service – SendHub, a relatively new startup, has already got so many clients.

The essence of SendHub is awfully simple: as long as you provide everyone in your potential contact base with your phone number (previously selected among versatile SendHub options) and any chosen keyword, each user sending the keyword to this very number will automatically be added to your contact list. In such a way, you’ll be able to send multiple SMS’s to everyone from the list and inform your clients about the news, updates or discounts in a faster way.

At first sight, the idea of SendHub is seemingly very convenient for an enterprise, as there’s no need to either collect the contact data or share the information manually. The automechanism will do it for you.

At the same time, there’s something quite illogical about SendHub, without any doubt. To start with, many of us (ok, many like me))) get irritated, when notice one more spam-SMS from the service, you’ve once shared your number with, like the restaurant or the taxi-center, for instance. You’d definitely sign out from it, but, unfortunately, there’s no “Unsubscribe” link, as in e-mail newsletters. SendHub, at the same time, presupposes your voluntary decision to sign up for being spammed even more, is it even logical? For users, like me, it’s far from any common sense, in fact.

In this respect, it seems almost impossible, how SendHub clients get their customers contacts and, thus, manage to use the service after all.

In a whole, though I always tend to wish luck to any new startup, which has got something creative in it, I somehow miss a more usual way to spread news among the users. E-mail notifications or just the separate news sections at your account, like they do it at 4shared, for example, are a much better way out. The latter seems even more awesome, as you check the messages/news box only, if you need to find out about something new, otherwise, the notifications won’t disturb you.

Stay cool and Happy V-Day to all who care about the holiday)

Andy

Farewell to SMS Exchange…?

Who’d we be without communication? The lonely creatures living in caves, no? Fortunately, the history has prevented us from this cave-like kind of loneliness; whereas the recent technical progress has already reached such heights that it’s more likely for us to crave for not communicating with anyone at least for some time.

In particular, the development of Internet technologies has expanded our opportunities in distant communication, not only we’ve got the phones, but a lot more. Moreover, the latest news from Apple has raised the doubts about the cloudless future of one essential aspect in mobile phones’ industry – that is sending sms.

The thing is that the newly-presented iOS 5 features presuppose the users’ opportunity to exchange messages with other owners of iProducts without installing any additional apps and, what is essential, ab-so-lute-ly for FREE. Seems to be a bit unrealistic, but it is actually true. Here, will the sms's fade sooner, than we could have predicted?

Undoubtedly, they can’t but become less popular, especially if to remind of options to exchange DM’s in social networks, Skype or even your file-sharing friends (4shared, for instance, enables you to do that with other site’s users). For now, I wonder, which trick will the mobile operators use to maintain their positions?

If further talking about DM exchange, one more essential aspect, also worth mentioning is the message history. Apparently, although the number of messages sent&received via iConnection will, perhaps, depend on the amount of your iDevice’s (+memory card) memory likewise as with old-known SMS’s, and Facebook or 4shared DM history is being stored without any limits in the taken space, Twitter still has got some troubles, concerning users’ ability to access some old-written messages of theirs. It seems odd, if to consider the service’s development paste and scale. It seems disappointing. And discouraging, surely.

In a whole, the fact that the newest technologies allow us socialize with people living in various parts of the world in a simpler way is more than awesome. But do they hide any danger for our face-to-face communication? I won’t be a moralizer here, certainly, I’ll just wish you all to have a good day and go meet my best friend over a cup of hot coffee)))


C ya)
Andy