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3jam - Texting for Everyone?
When I first heard about 3jam I was kind of psyched. The idea of being able to leverage text messages (SMS) from my phone without having to spend money per message intrigued me. Then I got the beta invite and gave it a whirl. Not saying I thought it was horrible, but there is definitely some room for improvement.
After I set it up and verified my phone and everything I tried sending my first message, from the web interface, to my girlfriend. She got it moments later from a cryptic 'from' address which would scare most people off. The next thing that happened was she got a second text message asking if she wanted to continue the conversation or abandon it completely (and not receive any messages from 3jam). This seems like a problem to me.
The idea of building a system like this is not to limit the ability to send messages to people. I understand that this is put in place to stop people from spamming, but maybe have a more user friendly message. "Mike Smith is using 3jam to send you messages. Do you want to keep receiving messages from him?"
I was even able to keep that message under 120 characters. I think once 3jam does a little bit more user-testing and sifting through feedback, they'll do a bit of a better job in this market.
After I set it up and verified my phone and everything I tried sending my first message, from the web interface, to my girlfriend. She got it moments later from a cryptic 'from' address which would scare most people off. The next thing that happened was she got a second text message asking if she wanted to continue the conversation or abandon it completely (and not receive any messages from 3jam). This seems like a problem to me.
The idea of building a system like this is not to limit the ability to send messages to people. I understand that this is put in place to stop people from spamming, but maybe have a more user friendly message. "Mike Smith is using 3jam to send you messages. Do you want to keep receiving messages from him?"
I was even able to keep that message under 120 characters. I think once 3jam does a little bit more user-testing and sifting through feedback, they'll do a bit of a better job in this market.