Bulk SMS Mobile industry news

RSS + SMS launched by Yahoo was reported by Russel Beatie's on his blog on 1 December.

Strange that we looked at the developments in the browser SMS world on 2 December too.

What Yahoo did, was to launch a service where subscribers could opt in to receive updates of the RSS feeds they are watching.

You have the choice to sign up for alerts to be sent to a mobile phone or a pager and you could set the amount of messages you want to receive a day. The service is limited to 7 networks in the US only at this stage.

This news was received with mixed feelings and comments on Beatie's blog. US residents felt that it might be just antoher way to swamp their inboxes - I think they forget that one have the choice to sign up or not.

Another mystery to those that commented was how it was possible to do this for free. Simple - revenue share.

Some other comments included that it is not fair of Yahoo to launch this in the US only, but in response to that:

1. In the US subscribers pay for incoming and outgoing messages. If Yahoo is getting revenue share from the networks, then they get more revenue share.


2. This is only beta so maybe when it works they will roll it out in other countries.

I am not too sure if the general public will go for this but in my opinion it will definitely be popular among media members.

In my personal opinion I would just like to see WAP bookmarking included in the RSS which at this stage is limited to the first 120/160 characters of the RSS feed.

It would be much easier to follow a url from the alert for detailed news.

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