Earlier this week I spoke to Jeff Wilson, CEO of Telsis, who talked me through a new service he’s designed called “justdotme”. It looks like an eccentric idea, but Wilson points out that the industry has a poor record of predicting breakout successes. Could this be one?
Justdotme is a service that allows one user to post, via SMS, a message to a virtual noticeboard. Anyone who then texts that original user’s number with just a dot “.” will receive the original message as a text.
The word is that this is very much Jeff Wilson’s idea, and as he’s the CEO of one of the more successful tech companies in messaging over the past decade, and invented Telsis’ SMS Home Routing capability, he’s probably worth listening to.
The service works like this. A user wants to be able to get notice to anyone who has their number. Say you are running a music or sports group and the location of a practice has changed. The user starts his text with a dot, then writes his message.
Telsis’ SMS Router sees the dot, and sends the message to a virtual noticeboard. Other users can then text a dot to the original sender’s number and if they do so they are then delivered the original message.
The idea is that it avoids someone having to send lots of texts, or a group text.
The problems of this service, as it occurs to me, are:
1. Group text and group messaging apps: If I were managing a group of some kind, I’d set up a group on my phone, and text them from there. Of course, downside is it goes out as many texts. I get unlimited texts, though, so it’s not too much of an issue. For really large groups, though, you can see the issue. Of course, there’s also What’sApp and other group messaging apps, which do this even better.
2. No notification: I don’t know if someone I know has posted an update. I have to dot the number in question to know if someone has put a message on the “noticeboard”. This may be OK in terms of a specific event I know is upcoming, but it’s pretty useless in terms of the adhoc, chit chat, etc updates you see on most social networking sites.
Which brings us to
3. The ability to post one message on a noticeboard to be seen by your contacts or friends? Sound familiar?
Well, Wilson posits that not everyone has internet access on their phone, and if they do, they don’t use it for social networking. The same goes for group messaging apps – they are not ubiquitous. Perhaps. But it makes a fairly limited case for justdotme in mature markets.
As for notifications, Wilson said that the company is introducing a double dot capability, which will allow someone to send a double dot to a number in advance of any announcement, and then when the update is made it is delivered. It’s not a notification service, though.
Telsis does have a customer. Etisalat Nigeria’s eight million customers can now post information by texting it to the shortcode 8900. The operator is branding the service as Etisalat DotMe.
Etisalat Nigeria CEO Steven Evans says, “Early adopters are religious organisations who are using it to update their congregation on daily scripture readings, inspirational messages and other church information. DotMe is also positioned to help other businesses post short and quick. For the young and young at heart, DotMe will serve the important purpose of helping keep friends updated on the social scene while on the go. Here at Etisalat, we have already begun to use this unique service to keep our various audiences informed on our various promotions and activities and we are seeing positive results.”