sms

Last week for my “Quick Idea” I did a post on sending a text message to find free wi-fi. Since then I’ve found a couple of ways that currently exist to attack the problem. These seem to be the best:

4Info
How it works: Register your cell phone number at www.4INFO.net, send a text message to 4INFO (44636) with the word “wifi”, a space, and then either a zip code or a city name. You will receive one or more text messages back with the locations listed with address.

Hotspotr.com or m.hotspotr.com on your phone
This is just a list of hotspots, both free and paid, that does have a mobile friendly version. No text messaging though.

ilovefreewifi
This one would be my favorite, if it delivered on what Lifehacker promised. It is a community driven site where people list places with free wifi. Lifehacker did a write up in which it depicts the service as almost exactly what I had hoped for in last weeks post. It claims that you can send it a text and get a list of places w/code back, that then you reply with for more info - the problem is, this doesn’t seem to be communicated anywhere on the site. Oh… and if you live in the Cleveland area (which I still kind of do for a few more days) then you only have 2 spots to choose from and the service is more or less pointless, unless you start adding wifi spots.

That’s a lot more than I knew last week, which is just one more reason for me to continue doing the “Quick Ideas” posts - but this weeks may be a little different in that I will likely take on the idea in the next week or so…

So yesterday I said I had a big bag of new sites to blog about after my little hiatus, and today I give you a site that has its focus elsewhere. In fact the focus is reaching people when they’re not online. TextMarks, launched not that long ago and it has received some attention, but not enough. The concept is simple, people subscribe to a keyword by sending a text message with the keyword to 41411. After that, the owner of the keyword can send out a mass message to all of the people that have subscribed.

I like the service because it is amazingly easy to sign up for and use, and delivers an extremely clear message. I’m pretty sure Mozes is competing in this space, but I’m never really sure what Mozes is all about. Mozes really should have the edge, it is well designed (though I hear slanted stripes are on their way out) and has a musical slant with plenty of influencers on board. But, I’m still not sure what it’s about.

I guess there are two ways to view these services. 1 - they’re for people that are always connected to a group and want updates all the time or 2 - they’re for people in groups that don’t associate with each other all that often. I’m using TextMarks for purpose number 2 - at least in my first usage of it. I’ve been delegated the task of updating my old high school class website, and to me that’s pointless because no one ever goes to the thing. All we want are the occasional messages to tell us what’s going on. For that TextMarks will work great - so would a blog, but my guess is a lot more people would want this info to come from a text rather than an RSS feed (and I don’t have to explain that your MyYahoo page is made of RSS feeds).

Update: Dorrian from Mozes posted a couple of comments that are worth reading if you’re interested in this area.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately in places without internet access, but I want to be informed if anyone blogs anything about Lopico. Granted, I am the person that blogs the most about Lopico, I see other posts from time to time and with all of the recent changes I’d just like to stay on top of things. Combining Yahoo Alerts and a Technorati Watchlist, I can do just that. This is great for me and even better for someone with more press - but probably not great for an extremely large amount.

First set up your technorati watchlist for the topic you’d like to have monitored. This will track all blogs that are included in the technorati index for your topic. You can get an RSS feed for the watchlist, which you’ll need for Yahoo Alerts. The link for the feed is at the bottom of the page. Alternatively you could use Google Blog search, but I’m more of a technorati fan.

Next set up a yahoo alert to go to your mobile phone. The instructions are very easy, you just need the RSS address from the first step. That’s it. Now anytime someone mentions your business in a blog, or other RSS feed, you will be notified instantly. Very easy and very useful.