The cat is out of the bag. If you run a Meetup group, now you can send and receive text messages. You can even do RSVPs on any cell phone!. More here

Howdy - the team has had it’s head down for a while working on The Next Big Thing (NBT). Along that path we decided to focus on making our mobile site the best group organizing tool that you can use anywhere.

The result is the new Padpaw Mobile which I encourage everyone to try. Set up a group today and you can use our group text messaging features until we turn on the meter.

We’re taking a big risk here, but we think it’s better to concentrate on the tool people will use when they need our features most. Our strength is in helping people manage the “last hour” of time between people leaving work/home and getting together to have fun and accomplish great things. As such, we’ll be concentrating our development on our mobile site.

Oh, and about that NBT? If you set up a group, you’ll find out what it is =)

- Keith

My Better Half asked me yesterday that since more people are buying smart phones to replace their feature phones, would they just use email instead of text/sms? Good question! Her experience with smart phones is in watching me interact with them. If my phone bleeps at me, I pay attention whether its a text, IM, or email. However, I’m a corner case and don’t mind spending time, energy, and hours of Googling to configure my phone the way I want it.

Text messaging is still the easiest way for someone to send a message to a phone due its out-of-the-box operation and the easy UI. This combination is what propels the number of messages into the billions each month and sets a high barrier for other competing solutions. Email requires a setup which is beyond a lot of people. IM networks still aren’t federated to the point where I can send an MSMessenger user a message from my GTalk account.

So, if you want to send a message to someone’s phone and get their attention, texting is still the simplest way for them to get it. What I do see changing in a year is the type of information sent in the text message. As more people have mobile web browsers with attached data plans available for their use, Padpaw will start sending links back to the web site (or other sites) with our messages. This is especially helpful when something can’t be explained in 160 characters.

While upgrading our production server this weekend, we unintentionally routed incoming text messages to our development systems. The “Dev” system, not knowing any of the phone numbers it was receiving message from did its job and ignored the messages. We realized the problem last evening and was able to fix it. If you received a number of texts in a row, that was our production server catching up.

Bottom line - we screwed up. Silver lining - no one lost their messages to Padpaw.

- Keith

OK - so I made it sound like we were closing shop in April. Funny thing happened since that post, we’ve gotten a heck of a lot more interest in Padpaw. In addition, we’re working on some new cool things. Yesterday’s post of a new feature is a step in that direction.

So, apologies for being all “angsty” (as my daughter says). Padpaw is chugging along like the Little Engine that Could

Organizers can now control how member text messages are routed. Until now, the default behavior was to send all messages in a “reply-all” fashion. However with even moderately sized groups, a large number of messages can be sent.

Organizers can control message flow by going to the Groups tab. Under the description of your group, click on the “Edit” link. You have four option in routing member messages:

• All messages go to all group members: This is “reply all” messaging. Everyone in your group will get everyone else’s replies. This is great for small groups.
• Member messages only go to group creator: The creator, or the original person that created the group and who’ll pay for messages, will get member replies. This option will keep the lead organizer informed of any member issues.
• Member messages go to all group organizers (not members): In addition to the creator, anyone that is designated as an organizer will get member messages. This is good for large groups that need several people to coordinate members.
• Member messages only posted on the group message board: Any message from members will only be visible on the website. Messages from the organizer will still go to the members. This option is ideal if you primarily send a lot of important reminders.

Select the option that you like and click “Submit”. Your selection will take effect immediately.

Just wanted to quickly tell you about a new feature for Padpaw. You can now use the group SMS function to collect data. This is perfect for a business that needs a quick an easy way to enter remote data. To use it, just text:

data [group name] [data goes here]

To retrieve the data, just log into Padpaw and look for the “Export Data” link under your group’s description. Click on the link and you’ll download a tab delimited file suitable for import into your favorite spreadsheet. Right now the data will be in one field, but we’d like your input on how to make parsing better and easier. Give it a try and let us know.

Occasionally, Padpaw gets audited by a carrier to make sure our SMS opt-in process is up to standards. A recent audit made me do some research on best practice guidelines and that’s when I found a statement regarding email-to-sms gateways.

I’ve exchanged a lot of information with people using Email-to-SMS gateways for text messaging. We used them when Padpaw was being prototyped which gave us a quick solution for testing with members. Using the gateways for production systems is another matter. Different companies have different experiences, but the consensus is that if carrier sees a large number (anyone’s guess as to what that number is) from one email address or domain, they’ll designate it as a spam source and ignore further emails. This is regardless of your best intentions, and quite frankly the carriers want to see the revenue from those messages.

You can find the industry position in the Mobile Marketing Associates Consumer Best Practices Guidelines. This is the rule book companies like Padpaw have follow if we want to use SMS in our applications (see 14.0 Use of Carrier SMTP Gateways for Commercial Traffic , excepted here):

Messages sent via SMTP are subject to Section 14(b)(1) of the CAN-SPAM act and may result in prosecution of any entities sending unsolicited messages via this route. Put simply, SMTP-based delivery provides no guarantee messages will be received by the recipient, offer none of the benefits of a direct or aggregator connection and, none of the capabilities required by Consumer Best Practices, and may run the risk of legal action against the sender. It is not considered a Consumer Best Practice, therefore, to direct any application- to-person or commercial traffic via carrier SMTP gateways.

I’d like to announce that we’ll be closing our own hosted service for the time being within the next 90 days. If you have a group that you want to organize in that time frame, please feel free to use the site, but know that it might not be around this summer.

We’ve decided to focus on bringing our experience in mobile messaging (i.e. SMS and making it work on your web service) to other projects. We’ll be making some announcements on that in the near future.

A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with Rich Sands and we talked about smart phone demand in 2009. Here’s what we resolved:

• US market (which I most concerned about) is at saturation (90%). Major growth in sales to new customers are over.
• Consumer market will delay upgrading current phones as long as possible. This will track with overall consumer confidence
• But, when they do replace their existing phone, they’ll most likely go for a smart phone over another clamshell
• Data plans will be purchased with these new phones

Rich and I have some different ideas on when this will happen, but timing this is next to impossible. However, the implications for Padpaw are big in regards to messaging. The more people with data plans means more options for sending messages other than through SMS. I’m currently using GTalk on my G1 and it presents IMs just like email or text messages. The other opportunity is in application development, but that’s for another post.