« Google Phone confirmed | Home | Amp’d launches in Canada »
Yahoo’s Mixd shut down
By David | March 19, 2007
Yahoo’s push into community texting was put to a hard stop on Feb 25. Mixd was launched in November 2006 and allowed groups to send multicast messages to each other (one-to-all).
Based on Echovox’s (my company) accumulated experience in group texting (SMS and MMS) across Europe, I believe these types of services are too complex to use for the average mobile subscriber. Unlike the web, SMS doesn’t have an interface from which you can click on commands. Adding commands to an SMS service generally rarely works unless you just pushed the instructions to the user. Users won’t remember commands like “whisper”, “mute” and others. When we initially launched group chat in Europe in 2002 we thought users would want to go private with other chatters, use nicknames and many other things, the result was that no one used the service! We removed everything, nickname, commands, and let end-users get in a chatroom by sending a simple START keyword and then whatever they would send to the shortcode from that point would be sent to the other people in the chatroom, period. Some of the most successful of these chatrooms now generate over 2 million messages a month each.
I’m really curious to see how companies such as Dodgeball (acquired by Google in 2005) evolve. I believe it will take mass adoption of GPS enabled handsets for these to take-off seriously. End-users will define their buddy lists on the web, download an application on to their handsets and then switch the “locator” function on or off when appropriate.
In the meantime it will take a long and painful walk for web-centric companies to launch successful mobile services as they will come across the limitation of a reduced real-estate (screen, buttons), non-standardized environment (rendering of images and stylesheets for each device due to different screen sizes and resolutions) and carrier integration.
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: Yahoo, mixd, SMS, SMS CHAT, Dodgeball, Echovox |
