posts about textme
We’ve some news we’d like to share with you. It’s about a product we’ve been working on & if you don’t have the time to read this, we understand, you can just check it out here.
As you may or may not know, Textme has been a nights-and-weekend-and-vacations passion project of ours. If you’ve ever wanted to message any text, images, videos, news, jokes or articles to your own or friend’s mobile, then you’ve been wanting Textme, the simplest send-to-mobile service in the country.
We believe the time is right and we’re ready to announce that you can now use Textme to send anything you want from your web browser to any mobile in India. All you’ve to do is go to www.OnTextme.com when you’re on a computer and click the “Get Textme, it’s free” button to get started.
This journey is going to be amazing.
We will need your help. Lots of it.
So do reply back with any feedback or thoughts you may have, share it with your friends & help everyone around you use it. There’s a lot you can use it for in your everyday life (like sending IPL scores these days).
Are you in?
It’s been a long run here and we’re proud to announce to our followers, the early release of the all new version of Textme at ontextme.com.
What’s new this time?
Textme now installs right into your web browser with just a click or two. So when you find something on the web you want to send to any phone in the country, just click on the Textme button. How cool is that right? We’re the first to do it.. and do it right! We fully support Chrome and Firefox while some of the features are available in IE, Safari, Opera, etc.
As of now, you can use Textme only if your mobile number is not registered in the DND. This is in accordance with TRAI regulations.
There’s more coming soon… Till then, spread the word and try us!
Before you continue reading: The simplest way to add the Textme button to your website is by using the “Get the Code” wizard. Most of it is self-explanatory. Continue reading only if you need an in-depth understanding into configuring and advanced options.
Adding the Textme button to your webpage is is very similar to adding a tweet or facebook button. The easiest way is to use the Javascript method which involves adding a line of javascript and an anchor tag to your webpage. You can customize the message, url, counter and other settings using data attributes.
<a href="http://ontextme.com/share" class="textme-share-button"></a> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s1.ontextme.com/js/widget.js"></script>
Properties
There are a few properties that allow you to customize the button and its behavior. All the properties are optional but you can set them if you want to control the message and the url which the user shares. If the link and the message are not provided, the button will use the default values available from the web page.
| Attribute | Description | Value |
|---|---|---|
| data-url | URL of the page to share | string |
| data-text | Default message to text | string |
| data-count | Position of the count box | horizontal, vertical, none |
| data-byline | Help message shown to the user on the Textme screen | string |
In a hurry? Get the Code
It’s been almost 7 months since the launch of our first prototype. Textme has now been used more than 2 million times and we’ve garnered a rich fan base on facebook. We’ve collected all kinds of feedback and studied every aspect of sharing to a mobile. Also, the upcoming TRAI regulations have required us to incorporate a few changes to become more compliant. This brings us to the next version of Textme which is located at a brand new domain OnTextme.com
What has changed?
A lot has changed, but it’s still as fast and easy to use. Here’s a gist:
Rich content sharing
We’ve shifted our focus from plain text to rich content sharing. Just like how you’d integrate a facebook share, tweet button to share content with social platforms, the Textme button is the first of its kind and aims to become the defacto standard for sharing to a mobile platform.
If you’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been a post since Feb 8th to now, this one is to answer that. No, we’re not dead. No, we’re not dying. No, we’re not bored of our own concepts. Honestly, we’ve just been busy (with textme!) and we want to share a lesson learned -
When you’re rolling a startup, it takes loads of time (and more importantly energy) to be able to blog alongside. The best break for someone working non-stop on a web-startup is getting off the web. Being transparent is difficult after all.
We still want to keep trying. Give us a little more time before we start shooting out all kinds of posts and updates! Also, if we’ve been keeping you waiting for too long over Textme, hang in there! We’re on the job.
Remember the survey we took sometime back? If you were curious, have a look at the presentation below to understand why we asked you those questions and what the outcome was. If you happened to fill it in, thanks a ton! You have helped us understand and build our free, secure and super easy sms widget for every website in India. It’s called textme and you can try out a demo at textmewidget.com
Download Presentation (high quality)
It was early 2010 and we needed the addresses of quite a few companies for an errand we had to run. We were visiting each of their websites and noting down addresses on a random piece of paper. A little into it, we realized how we could simply use Justdial. We realized the second reason we loved Justdial was because they simply send you all the information you need in an ad-free and fat-free sms. Saved us a lot of time!
We even witnessed this feature on websites like burrp, sulekha, mouthshut and justdial in the form of “Send to Mobile” buttons. Its a tiny feature from the users point of view, but it can really save you a LOT of work the few times you may bother using it. We loved it and we thought of implementing it on a few of our client’s websites. We thought it wouldn’t be too difficult… its just a javascript popup and some backend/ajax code anyway! But here we are after experiencing it, telling you truly what a pain in the ass it could be (and has been for us):
- Convenience: Even though bulk sms isn’t too expensive, we’d have to buy a new sms gateway account or sender id for every website. Along with it came the headache of regularly checking balances and renewals.
- Security: Easy to use, but even easier to misuse. Providing this great functionality feels interesting, but having to deal with spamming, flooding, logging, limits, captcha, etc already felt tedious.
- Easy integration: We needed something we could easily plug in and out of websites but it turned out that all the security and logging features would require a lot more setup and management from server to server.
- Reliable and fast: Picking the right one, having a backup and being able to switch sms gateways in future felt important for a near-instant and reliable delivery. This is a trial and error process and we’ve tried so many providers before we locked on a few! (and lost some money in the process of doing so.)
- Privacy Protection: This one is a bigger deal than most webmasters think it is. Everyone is complaining about promotional phone calls and junk sms a week after they are exposed to some kind of sms service. The truth is that a lot of sms gateways do not have a transparent privacy policy and/or they are very possibly selling your customers information to third-party-advertisers.
So we decided, chuck it.. let’s just build one uniform widget that takes care of everything we need and worry about; and host it on our own servers. We can keep improving security and features over time while our clients can just integrate it via some easy javascript code – similar to sharethis, addthis or facebook. A week into this idea, it felt like the world’s simplest sms gateway. It felt like the journey a web startup would want to go through. So we said yes, let every website in India use it, for free!
Here we are a few months after putting in a lot of work into that simple thought we started off with. Now, it ironically looks like we just made something simple, recognizable and usable for every website in India. Its called textme!
So try it to save yourself and your visitors the butt pain. BTW, we didn’t mean to offend anyone or their butts.
This one took us longer than we expected, but we’re happy to announce the beta of Epicwhale’s first product for websites in India - textmewidget.com
Textme is all about sending content from the web to a phone. It can be instantly integrated into your website and customized to send useful information like addresses, tickets, snippets, confirmations or anything else you may want to! It has an incredible ease of use, a recognizable design & the textme promise that increase your users trust.
