Spread your New Year toast with Online Texting

A couple of weeks ago I set up 56 scheduled SMS Christmas greetings at online texting site www.looknothumbs.com. I did this around December 18th. It only took about 10 minutes, and then I completely forgot I’d done it until Christmas morning when, in the space of about an hour I received 34 text messages on my mobile phone - replies from friends and family around the world who’d received my message, scheduled for 8.30am.

I hadn’t anticipated that, but it turned out to be a nice way to include everyone in our family Christmas morning as I watched gifts being unwrapped and my living room being trashed by small children. The replies included comments about similar mayhem in friends homes, which was also fun to share.

So for New Year I’m doing it again. Here are the steps, in case you have a few minutes and want to check this out:

1. Register on www.looknothumbs.com (or register interest first to get your invitation) and buy some text credit.

2. Import or enter some mobile numbers into your LookNoThumbs address book, and create groups if you want to send the same message to lots of people (ideal for holiday greetings!).

3. Send a text message to each group or person, setting the delivery time for 1/1/2008 some time in the morning. I’m sending to 2 groups - one for friends and one for customers - plus a few individual texts where I wanted to personalise the message.

Just for fun, leave your phone on around the time you’ve scheduled your message, and see who’s still up partying and responding to your greeting.

Remember, the great thing is that you can set up your greetings now for delivery on Jan 1st, so you don’t have to fumble with your phone when you should be spreading your toast.

Happy 2008 everyone!

Online Texting Anti-spoofing Measures, and about time!

Bulk text messaging (SMS) supplier Clickatell is now preventing online texting customers from setting the Sender ID header on each outbound SMS message.

It’s a subtle change that many won’t care about or perhaps even notice. But serious online texting services like www.looknothumbs.com welcome this as an important and necessary step towards privacy, security and trust in text messaging; and one that delivers a clean blow on the chin to SMS spammers and would-be fraudsters who threaten this market.

Here’s why.

If you’ve ever opened an email and discovered it’s not what it appeared to be, you may know that you can’t always trust the From: header in email. That’s because any program that creates email messages can insert any value into that header. This is an artefact of SMTP - a protocol developed in a more innocent age but still used today to deliver most Internet email.

Text messaging doesn’t use SMTP, but the principle is the same. The sending software constructs the text message, including a Sender ID header, which is treated as the sender’s mobile number or a text identifier. This is useful because if the Sender ID matches an address book entry in the receiving phone, you might see “From: Bob Smith” rather than “From: 07123456789”.

Note: SMS spamming and spoofing have not been a huge problem in the USA. That’s partly because of limitations with U.S. network operators, and partly because SMS spamming is prosecuted as a felony in the U.S. with serious consequences for convicted offenders. However, spoofing in particular is a problem in other regions, including Europe, where bona fide applications depend on the Sender ID header as an enabler for replies.

So what’s new?

Well last month, Clickatell told customers it was dropping support for ad-hoc setting of the Sender ID header. Sender IDs now have to be pre-registered or pass stringent, auditable, security checks by Clickatell or its security-conscious customers like www.looknothumbs.com.

Why is this a good thing?

This measure eliminates spoofing because sending programs can no longer impersonate Sender IDs undetected. It also discourages spam because the message originator is easily traceable and appropriate action can be taken.

But perhaps most importantly, it discourages bad citizenship in electronic messaging culture. SMS is a cherished child of the mobile industry. It’s beloved by its users and suppliers alike for its convenience, and its seemingly limitless capacity for valuable applications. Nobody wants text messaging to suffer the fate of email, riddled with unwanted content and virtually unusable for many.

With this new measure in place, suppliers are taking the short-term risk of reduced traffic, but the pay-off will be high-quality content and long-term trust in the medium, which will fuel continued growth in this sector.

At online texting site www.looknothumbs.com, all hats are off to Clickatell for taking this initiative.

Tags: anti-spam, business, clickatell, free, messaging, Mobile, Online Texting, texts

Online Texting v SPAM

The words online texting and SPAM really should not be spoken in the same sentence. However, while stumbling I found this article relating to SMS messaging being received when it is unwanted. It points the finger at Verizon and informs the reader how to opt out of receiving spammy SMS messaging.

At LookNoThumbs.com, a new online texting service, there is a policy where any of its users who are found to be SPAMMING will be removed from the service - immediately.

At this cool web-site, you can use online texting services functions to protect your privacy but still get those updates that are important or valuable to you. Their “Alerts and Subscriptions” service is where the sender creates an Alert with informative and useful messages and users then Subscribe anonymously to the Alert to receive the latest update when it becomes available from the sender. If the recipient gets tired of the updates it is a simple case of unsubscribing from that Alert. No questions asked.

For example, let’s say your favourite store has an alert published in LookNoThumbs.com. As a regular there you don’t want to miss their annual pre-Christmas sale. So you subscribe to their “Pre-Christmas Sale Alert” and when they send it out you immediately receive the text message informing you of the date and time of the sale. You are then first in line to snap up that last minute bargain - along with the other subscribers!

Online texting, and SMS messaging in general, is booming and many important, and fun, uses have been developed for this technology. Maybe the big communications corporates are selling out their users already but LookNoThumbs.com is providing an alternative, allowing privacy to be retained without losing out on new updates. Let’s keep the SPAMMERS out of online texting and SMS messaging alogether.

Tags: Alert, Christmas, Greetings, messaging, mobiles, Online Texting, SMS, Subscription

The Online Texting Business that wants to Be Nice.

Life isn’t fair sometimes, that’s for sure. But have you noticed how many businesses rely on policies that are heavily stacked in favour their own agenda rather than what the customer wants? Online texting service www.looknothumbs.com is taking a fresh approach.

Here are just a few examples of unfair policies that we’ve come to accept.

1. When you buy goods or services in advance, such as a gift voucher or prepaid text messages for your mobile phone, you’ve paid good money for them. The business has had the advantage of your money often long before actually delivering the goods or services. So why do so many businesses think it’s OK for these vouchers to expire after a month, 3 months or even a year if they’re not used? (check the small print!) As long as the business is still active, shouldn’t they either honour your purchase or at least refund the purchase price if they want to expire it?
2. If you buy something for your own use, then decide you can’t use it all yourself, what’s the harm in passing it on to someone else who can use it? And why should you even have to consult the issuer on this matter? Sure, there may be good reasons for some things not to be transferable, but prepaid gift vouchers for goods and services, and prepaid text messages simply should not be in that category.
3. Why is it acceptable for mobile suppliers to come up with and impose extra fees (roaming charges) on each other’s customers when they’re travelling  ? I haven’t agreed to this, or rather if I have, they buried it in so much small print that I missed it. The fact remains that I’m using the same device for the same purpose, so why the extra fees at all just because I’m away from home, and why so high?
4. Why do so many service companies require you to commit to 12 or 18 months to ensure a “special” price for their services? Could it be to ensure that you can’t vote with your feet and easily switch suppliers if they provide anything other than top quality service? That’s a sure sign of a business unsure of its own ability to deliver. Look very hard for alternatives to any business like this, because they’re too focussed on attracting new customers at any cost, and not interested enough in retaining YOU.

Online texting service www.LookNoThumbs.com aims to offer a breath of fresh air in a market where service plans and pricing are typically hidden in a smog of confusing conditions and short-lived special offers. They provide an easily understood and fairly priced service with no long-term commitment, designed to attract and delight both business and personal customers.

• Their online store offers pre-paid text messages at just one flat rate.
• Your prepaid texts don’t expire as long as your account is active.
• Your texts are yours to use or give away to other LookNoThumbs users (great for teams and families).
• Unclaimed vouchers are returned to the sender after a certain period (and an email reminder)
• You will never pay extra fees to use LookNoThumbs from overseas; send your prepaid texts from any computer, anywhere in the world.

Businesses should be winning customer loyalty by backing their offerings with consistently good customer service, not by convincing them to accept unfair terms they’ll later regret. Time will tell, but let’s all hope LookNoThumbs.com’s radical approach to the online texting business inspires imitators elsewhere.

What’s So Great about Online Texting?

Texting is just texting, right ? Maybe and maybe not. Online texting portal www.LookNoThumbs.com lists these as some of the things you can do from a computer that you can’t do - or just can’t easily do - when texting straight from your phone.

• Paste text straight from an email message, document or web page into an SMS message. LookNoThumbs business clients find that pasting eliminates errors when communicating detailed information like booking confirmation numbers, flight times, addresses, directions etc.
• Send a text message when you’re not there. Online texting allows you to enter a text message now, but schedule delivery for later - possibly when you’re asleep, travelling or too busy to send the text when you really want it delivered. Some users set up reminders for themselves or others; important ToDo items, deadlines, meetings, greetings, appointments, or insurance renewal dates. Others use it to remind business clients of scheduled maintenance due dates. You may not always be at your desk to receive an email or calendar reminder, but you’ll usually not be too far from your mobile.
• Start a message with a template to reduce typing. Set up templates in your online texting account at www.looknothuumbs.com, and use them next time to avoid re-keying similar messages.
  
• Send an alert to interested subscribers. Set up alerts, invite subscribers, then text all of them at once without having to manage their contact information in your addressbook.
• Share your text credits with others. Send someone in your team or family some of your prepaid text balance as a Voucher.
• Send yourself an email or text copy of every message. Useful as a permanent reminder of what you sent, to whom and when.
• Text from any Internet device without re-learning how to text. Most phones have their own unique way of entering text or getting to the screen for texting.
• Safeguard your address book with password protection and automatic backup. Ever lost a mobile and realised there were numbers on it you don’t have anywhere else?  Access to your online texting account is password-protected and SSL encrypted; your account data including your addressbook is automatically backed up for you by the service.
• Text from abroad without roaming charges. Going on holiday? Use online texting from your hotel and avoid the inflated cost of sending a text when you’re connected to a foreign network. This alone is reason enough to have an online texting account to supplement your mobile.
• Text when your mobile battery is dead. Or, save your weak battery for real emergencies by texting from a PC instead.
• Text when you forgot to bring your phone. Send your messages from any online computer; replies will still go to your phone so you can log out and walk away knowing you won’t lose touch.
• Text when you have no mobile signal. The mobile network simply can’t reach every location; you can still text out from any Internet-connected computer with your online texting solution.
• Send loooong messages. SMS was really designed for short messages, but online texting allows you to send a message as long as you like, by breaking it into parts. This can be done automatically by the service or easily by you.

That’s not a short list, or even a complete one, but one thing is clear; online texting has earned its rightful place in today’s mobile toolbox, right alongside your phone. Using the right tool for the job is the key to getting your business and personal messages out easily! When you’re truly on the go, maybe that’s your phone. But when you’re near a computer it’s increasingly more likely to be an online texting solution like www.looknothumbs.com !