Beats me. I have a lame old phone and am waiting for my local Verizon store to get the V710 in stock. But Russell Beattie posted his thoughts about Yahoo's SMS News Alerts and Mobile Alert IDs.
Even though I've never used or seen the service, I agree with the points Russell makes and suspect that he's simply right.
Why?
Russell lives and breathes this stuff. Anyone who's been reading his stuff more than few days knows this. There's a good chance that some of the folks who build the Yahoo Mobile services also live and breathe this stuff, but I'd be shocked it all of them do.
Near the end of his post, he jokes:
Just remember where you saw all this first so when Yahoo implements it I can demand a free t-shirt or something.
Well, you know what? I'm going to make sure he gets a shirt. He's providing some publicity for our services and a helpful dose of expert criticism.
If the Yahoo Mobile group doesn't have shirts (or aren't willing to provide one), I'll go to the company store and buy one myself. And I'm going to deliver it in person. I've been reading Russell's blog for a long time and now that he lives up in San Francisco, there's really no good reason I haven't met him in person yet.
Hm. Maybe "being busy" is a good reason? Nah.
Russell: How's an XL?
Update: I've got an XL shirt here that appeared a few minutes ago. Now I just have to figure out when to get it to Russ.
Posted by jzawodn at August 01, 2004 07:32 PM
Bad virtual host config. Fixed now via DNS redirection.
That used the be the PHP Journal, which I hosted.
Of course you knew that when I wrote "someone who works at Yahoo" I was actually thinking about you, right? :-) Thanks for the vote of confidence in passing this along!
XL will be great, but wait and see if the mobile group do something with the idea first! It would probably take some coordination with the my.yahoo news guys etc., so it may not be as simple as it seems.
Your lame-old phone might still be able to get TXT messages so you can try alerts out. If not, the V710 should be a killer phone. Horrible UI as per normal with Motos, but great otherwise and sync with your Mac. It'll be interesting to see if Verizon has disabled the dial-up networking for Bluetooth or not...
-Russ
Yahoo Mail Alerts for SMS are one reason why Yahoo continues to be my primary email service. Another reason is that Yahoo Mail can be used with a non-SSL non-JavaScript browser.
Hey Jeremy...I don't know who you are but your site indicates that you know something about Yahoo's text message service. I used this service to text my girl friend in CA for a long time but suddenly it stopped working. I was texting from my computer to her Cingular cell phone. AOL texting still works but not Yahoo. Yahoo is no help in resolving the problem. Do you know anything about this? Thanks, Frank