Thursday, April 20, 2006

A Text Message Chatroom

When I spent a couple months interviewing teenagers and asked "What do you want your mobile to do", this was one of the highest rated responses.

"Can you make a text message chatroom?"

3jam , as the company is called, uses patented technology to deliver the first service that provides Treonauts (as well as all other standard cellphone users) the capability to simultaneously broadcast a single private SMS text message to as many people as you like and for any replies to be similarly received by all people in the group.

As it stands today, you could send the same text message ‘outbound’ to multiple recipients without 3jam. However, none of your recipients is able to know who else received the message and their ‘inbound’ replies are limited only to you instead of the whole recipient group.

3jam addresses and solves this by making it easy to start a sort of ‘SMS conferencing’ among a multitude of handsets in which all parties are participants not just the original sender.

This is just one of the applications teeangers want in a phone. Want to know the others?

I was wondering if there were any companies that were offering this. Great find Textually

2 comments:

SHL said...

I don't see the difference between this and Upoc's application. In fact, it can be quite annoying to be bombarded by all these messages at once.

Anonymous said...

Sin Hang,

Thanks for your note. The biggest difference is that 3jam is 1) completely ad hoc, and 2) designed for talking with your friends and not for subscribing to a 'Yahoo Groups' public bulletin board style service.

You can send messages to multiple people on the go (you don't need to set up any groups in advance via the web), everyone knows who else got the message, and any replies go to everyone. Similar to email, when people are replying to everyone excessively (we all know how annoying that can be) the group will self regulate by telling that person to stop responding to everyone (or by simply dropping out of the conversation)

I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have them.

Best,

Andy

(http://www.3jam.com)