Some time ago I read about TextMarks at Russell Beattie’s blog. At that time Russ wrote of personalized SMS cards. While I thought it was an interesting idea, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Russ posted more about TextMarks, then I saw Bill Day creating his own TextMark. Hm…
So I decided to spend more time looking into it… And I’ve to say the concept is very neat and has a lot of potential: it is like SMS-based User Generated Content, or a personal text messaging-based channel that can be push and pull-push. Very powerful indeed. It is like your own personal “short-codes” (well keywords).
With TextMarks you register your own keyword or TextMark, if still available (funny, most all good TextMarks are already taken, it is like domain-names but this time with SMS keywords). Then when someone texts your keyword/TextMark to 41411, you can return static or dynamic content (they provide an API) and they also have a very crude screen-scraping method.
Very powerful. My head is full of ideas related to this… The sky is the limit, as long the sky is no longer than 125 characters :-).
BTW, Russ’ idea of SMS-based business cards is very cool; text enrique to 41411 to get my contact information.
ceo