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.