MobileActive.org

South Africans use the word hectic to mean anything from cool, crazy, fun, to stressful. I mean hectic as the last sense of the word when I describe my efforts to accomplish a fairly simple goal in South Africa: set up a blog that I could update via SMS for a quick demo.

In the US

If I had tried to do this in the US, I would have had a myriad of possibilities, some good, and some bad. I will go through these possibilities to show the scope of what could be available in many countries, but isn't.

• SMS into Blogger. Google's Blogger allows you to post to your blog using SMS after you associate your phone with the blog. The process is simple, and Google provides a US number to SMS into.
• LetMeParty.com. LetMeParty.com is a service that has a number that will take incoming SMS to a US number they provide, and post to your blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, Xanga, MySpace). One of the issues here is that you need to provide your log-in credentials, which has massive security issues.
• Twitter of course allows you to "microblog" with texting in the US.
• SMS into Email and blog from your email. There are numerous services that allow you to blog via email. Wordpress allows it, Blogger allows it, and there are other services like Posterous, Moblog, Phlog, Tumblr, PixelPipe (and many others). In the US, the carriers have set up SMS gateways such that you can email using SMS--I can text 500 on the T-Mobile network and send an email for example. Internationally, SMS to email gateways are few and far in between (note the relevant column is empty for most non-US non-UK carriers).
• SMS into TextMarks, TextMarks to email, then blog from your email. Textmarks is a service that allows you to text 41411 in the US from other US numbers, and do keyword response from a webpage. The web page providing keyword response can send off an email as a side-effect. Admittedly, this is a bit of an awkward setup, and is not one I would prefer over a carrier-provided SMS to email gateway. In places where SMS-to-mail gateways are not available but TextMarks-like are, however, this could be essential.

In South Africa

Now back to South Africa, where I was trying to demo SMS blogging for an audience that came from all over Africa. I could not use carrier-based SMS to email gateways or Textmarks, for those were inaccessible. I was trying to set up a blog and twitter is really a different creature than a blog, so the option I was left with was with LetmeParty.com. It worked, but I had to text to a US number and surrender my login priviledges.

Now, a US reader might be wondering the point of the whole article anyways: who cares about blogging via SMS? Why not use the mobile web? And the reason here is parts of the world with low internet and high mobile penetration. Some of these places don't have mobile penetration that comes with data connections, or with users who do not have web-enabled handsets. (For example, there are estimates that just 60% of phones even in relatively-high-tech in South Africa, which has a mobile penetration of more than 100%, are WAP-enabled). For a world that can access information services only through calling and texting, there is no way to blog.

Now there might be little demand for SMS blogging in reality but we would love to hear what solutions there might be.  Do you know of any tools we should know about?  Please leave them in the comment section and we will update the post accordingly in a future entry. Thanks!