TextMark SMS Alerts TextMark is going to announce a paid service that sends SMS alerts for breaking news from a blog. I simply cannot see people paying upto $9.99 for this service. TechCrunch says that the bloggers get to keep a third of the subscription charges but in this world of RSS and River of News why would …. ? Oh, well. Thats not the crux of this post.
I already run a service where users can send ringtones, pictures, applications and text messages to their cell phones from a browser as long as they have access to the Internet on their phones and can receive SMS/text messages. The code is really surprisingly simple and it has been running for years with very little input from me. Over a 20,000 unique cell phones have received files and messages from this service since the beginning of this year alone. The point is, someone with a little bit of time, my cell phone code, the Subscribe2 Plugin and some WordPress widget expertise, could put together a widget that would easily rival everything that TextMark would offer and all of it would be free.
Oh, I wish there were more hours in the day!
I have the time and I could have your cell phone code. Too bad I’m not an expert in widgets. If not, I’d start working on it right now. 🙂
Would something like this be of value to people? Maybe it’s my lack of foresight, but I can’t see too much demand for this kind of service. I really can’t see anyone spending upwards of $10 for the subscription (and maybe some text message fees from their provider).
Yahoo! alerts has a system where you can receive sms or email alerts to your phone from an RSS feed for free. They’re pretty much dreaming if they think that anyone would pay for a service that can be achieved in so many ways at no cost.