Business focused online texting
Jan0
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- The looknothumbs.com online texting service requires no long term contract to be signed prior to commencement.
- Looknothumbs.com operates a pay as you go model allowing the business to easily control the level of commitment and investment.
Looknothumbs.com is a winner and its focus on business usage provides its customers with a no-nonsense, flexible online texting service.
Online Texting Anti-spoofing Measures, and about time!
Dec0
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.
Life, Fatherhood and Online Texting
Dec0
Three seemingly unrelated topics - life, fatherhood and online texting -have never been far from my thoughts this week; in fact dealing with life and fatherhood just reminded me of the incident that got me interested in creative applicatons for online texting (like www.looknothumbs.com) in the first place.
Not many Februaries ago, five men in their late thirties to early forties got together in the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow, Scotland for a quiet drink. This group grew up together not far from here, and some 18 years ago a gathering like this would have been an unremarkable, often twice-weekly occurrence. But life took its course, fatherhood consumed all our time for a while, people moved and regular meetings became impractical.
Such was this group’s dynamic that although we had all changed in appearance and had all been both treated and bitten by life’s experiences, this reunion was easy, natural, comfortable and thoroughly enjoyable – almost as if only weeks, not decades, had passed.
And so the witty banter and gentle teasing began after a few sips from the first pint, as it always will among male friends in Glasgow.
One of our group had stayed local, been extremely successful at work, and only thinning and receding hair qualified for comment among the other four. One had lived overseas and acclimatised to another lifestyle in various ways, including an expanded waistline – so the others claimed anyway – and loss of his Glasgow accent. But it was the oldest of the group who took the brunt of the fabled Glasgow ‘slagging’ that evening.
Here was a guy in his mid forties, with teenage children, who was completely phobic about sending mobile text messages. His children were texting constantly, including texts to him (he beamed as he proudly related this part). But he still protested that he didn’t see the point of texting because he could always phone someone.
I mulled this over for a while. My friend wasn’t the first person I’d come across who loves to receive a text message but refuses to send one. Fear of technology and specifically of ‘doing it wrong’ seems to crippling vast numbers of people over 40. (Scary – that includes me!) What is it about texting that makes people who are quite comfortable with email lash out against text messaging?
It dawned on me that what makes texting different, and unappealing, is that the method of entering a message requires special skill, with a steep learning curve to acquire it and constant practice to maintain it. What’s truly demoralising is that your learning investment investment is thrown away almost annually with every phone upgrade.
More than a decade into the text revolution, there is no universal set of instructions to cover every phone’s menus, multi-tap sequences and predictive text methods.
Is physically entering messages the only reason some people don’t like to text? Of course not, but it does seem to be the main one. Fortunately, with an online texting solution like www.looknothumbs.com, textphobia is a highly treatable condition.
LookNoThumbs (www.looknothumbs.com) is an easy to use website for business and personal online texting. It’s designed to compliment - not replace - your mobile phone and it makea texting MUCH easier. How? Simple – first, they replace the unfamiliar (mobile phone keypad and text entry systems) with the familiar – your computer’s keyboard and an email-like interface. Next, they present you with simple, flat-rate prepaid texts that can be shared with others and don’t expire. Finally, they’ve loaded the site with useful messaging features for all users that you’d normally expect to see only on a business or premium service.
LookNoThumbs is currently in Pilot as of December 2007, with registration by invitation only. But do register your interest to be sure of getting in early, because they’re currently sending out invitations every day. Check it out: www.looknothumbs.com
You’re probably wondering about my friend with the teenagers. Has he dropped the grudge against texting now? I honestly don’t know for sure, and I haven’t received a text from him yet. But being a true friend, I’ll be sending him an online texting voucher for www.looknothumbs.com this Christmas! Ho, Ho, Ho (LoL).
Happy Christmas!