Last year twitter has stopped the SMS tweeting service in India and no mobile users from India could receive updates and tweet from their mobile via SMS. Now Airtel & Twitter have come back again with a tie up for SMS  tweeting. This service is exclusively for Airtel subscribers only. If you are new to twitter, it is a popular social networking and micro blogging service.

If you are an existing twitter user and have your airtel mobile number updated  on your twitter account then no changes required  for you. You will start receiving tweets via SMS to which you are already subscribed and you can tweet via SMS.  If you already have twitter account and want to update your Airtel mobile number, just  send “Start” to 5300. If you new to twitter and want to get started, send “signup” to 5300 from your airtel number.

Although this encourages the tweeting habit by making the things easier, this service is bit expensive. Airtel charges Rs 1 for this Value Added Service. Alternatively you can just go to the twitter.com directly and update your mobile device details after logging in to your account. Anyway receiving SMS updates should be free of cost and you can make use of it.

Iterasi is a online archiving solution where you can store the exact page you found on the Internet and preserve it for life long. Either you can keep your archives public and share or keep it private. No matter the origin site goes dead or changes the page in future. You can still access the exact pages you archived on the Iterasi server.

There are three ways to archive a web page using this

1. You can straight away login to their website and store web page
2. Bookmarking any web pages in your browser (Just drag & drop) will be set to archive. No matter what browser you use. Internet Explorer, Google Crome, Firefox, Opera  & Safari are supported.
3. Install the browser extension in Internet explorer & Firefox versions and get more archiving options

Using the browser extension you can schedule the time to archive the specified web pages. Keep in mind that your browser should be running on the specified time so that it will initiate the archive on the server. When you look at the scheduled archives after years, you will realize the dynamic nature of the Internet. This archive is really useful if you found some thing wrong in any web page any you want to archive for evidence before the webmaster get alerted to change that.

Other than blog RSS feeds via SMS, you can also use the Google SMS service for news alerts, weather alerts. Also you make a SMS channel for your friends group and post MSG from web or from your mobile so that all your friends will recieve that MSG via SMS on their Mobile. Currently this free SMS service is availble to only Indian mobile number and supports English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

]]> http://www.digitaldreamers.in/send-free-sms-to-your-friends-using-google-sms-channels/feed/ 0 http://www.digitaldreamers.in/get-latest-news-alerts-in-im-with-ibn-live-gtalk-buddy/ http://www.digitaldreamers.in/get-latest-news-alerts-in-im-with-ibn-live-gtalk-buddy/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:43:37 +0000 praveen http://www.digitaldreamers.in/?p=90 Are you a Gtalk User + Fond of knowing latest news updates by going to IBNlive frequently? Then this stuff is for you only..  just add the chat id im@ibnalerts.com in your gtalk..  You will start getting breaking news in your IM chat window.

These are the other keywords you can use:

top: Gets you all the latest stories from IBNLive
sports: Gets you all the latest sports stories from IBNLive
biz: Gets you all the latest business stories from IBNLive
ent: Gets you all the latest showbiz stories from IBNLive
search: Search IBNLive’s stories (Example: “search Euro 2000″)
subscribe: Shows you the ways in which you can subscribe to or manage alerts

Once you add im@ibnalerts.com to your list. Status will continue to show as “invited” but you can start using it rightaway.

IM Feeds

Similar to the real-time news tracker Anothr, IM Feeds allows users to get RSS alerts sent via instant messengers. To get start started, simply add any of the corresponding IM Feed bots to your instant messaging program of choice.

Supported IM Networks

• AIM
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google Talk

Send the bot a message with “join” and from there you’ll be presented with a link to register your account. It’s as simple as that. To add feeds, you can send a message to the bot using the ‘sub’ command or go through your web account with IM Feeds. You can upload an OPML file or enter the full url of each RSS subscription you’d like to subscribe to.

If you’re managing your IM Feeds account on the web, your subscriptions will show up in a sidebar with a link to each. On the left, you’ll be presented with a list of links to each of the latest updates from your subscriptions. Subscriptions are listed in order by site instead of by date and time, which is a bit unusual for an RSS feed manager. The user interface for the service is nice, simple, and clean with little to no distractions. Even the technologically challenged can set up an account and manage their feeds through the web interface without any help.

• Web – Import your mobile contacts to their site and send sms easier than sending from mobile.
• Email – send sms to any Indian mobile right from email
• Mobile App – Send sms over GPRS from the mobile application
• SMS – Group your friends and send one regular sms from your mobile to reach all of your friends.
• Blog widget – Add the widget on your site and blog and your visitors send you sms.

I already see from their blog that they are trying to reach customers by location targeting ads.  Hope you may know Adwords (Seen their content targeted Google ads on some sites) and how Google does Geo targeting. An advertiser need to reach his business only to certain area can also benefit from adwords. On countries like US we can target up to few miles around the areas like New York though google ads. How is this? The concept behind that is by tracking the IP of the visitor and show the ads according to his residing area.

Same way here 160by2.com have the targeting option from the mobile number series. Since they have tie up with mobile operators they can get the location information of the mobile numbers. But this is limited to state wise and cannot do exact city targets like what Google does using IP. The alternative is, they could get the visitor location through the membership profile of 160by2.com. For example my home town is Salem and If I work in chennai, how can they know that? Need to have two options for location as orkut have.. Home town and current location… This should be most valuable data for  their business.  The thing is I wanted  to compare the concept of Google ad and 160by2 for Geo targeting and the potential value.

The only thing which I am not interested is they use 160by2.com as sms sender. Why do not they use senders actual number since they register and verify the mobile number. For branding they can add 160by2.com on below of each sms. Removing the mobile number from the sms will give out space for this signature. This is really a great Idea for the customers as the sms looks as if sent from their mobile.. Also one more thing, I am wondering why still Google does not get in to these type of business. They are keen about making innovations in mobile. From my understanding the next target is capturing the mobile marketing industry..

Recently they have extended the mobile text ads to image ads. Their acquisition of Android, an open source mobile operating systems competing symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Iphone Like that. This is the sign of conquering the mobile industry since they become giant in internet. They give free email and many free stuffs but did not look in to free sms which may reach the customers who may not even use internet. How potential it has…. !!! I think one day Google will look in to free sms service… That time 160by2.com should have attained the goal. They started this project as experiment and now have become 7th most popular mobile site (Opera report). Need to extend this globally before some body follow this potential concept. If 160by2.com get the global business then Google may acquire 160by2.com in near future…  WHO KNOWS!!!!