Better texting with Joopz

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Texting (the Short Message Service or SMS) has become not so much a means of communication as a way of life for many people. This is great if you have the dexterity of a teenager and double-jointed fingers the size of matchsticks. For the rest of us with limited patience and fingers like bananas there has to be something better.

You guessed it, I have indeed found something better: Joopz. It's a service offered by MobileSphere that allows you to be part of the world of texting using your PC instead of some microscopic keyboard on a cell phone the size of a book of matches.

When you sign up with Joopz, you provide your mobile telephone number along with name, e-mail address, and a password. Once verified through an e-mailed Web link Joopz provides a Web-based front-end to four services:

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Texting (the Short Message Service or SMS) has become not so much a means of communication as a way of life for many people. This is great if you have the dexterity of a teenager and double-jointed fingers the size of matchsticks. For the rest of us with limited patience and fingers like bananas there has to be something better.

You guessed it, I have indeed found something better: Joopz. It's a service offered by MobileSphere that allows you to be part of the world of texting using your PC instead of some microscopic keyboard on a cell phone the size of a book of matches.

When you sign up with Joopz, you provide your mobile telephone number along with name, e-mail address, and a password. Once verified through an e-mailed Web link Joopz provides a Web-based front-end to four services:

1. Two-Way “Web Texting” with a real-time history of all your conversations (the two way aspect is a unique feature – the competition that I know of is strictly outbound).

2. Group messaging supporting multiple simultaneous SMS exchanges.

3. Text reminders, which are messages that you can create to send to yourself at a given date and time.

4. Scheduled messages that are sent to another phone at a specific date and time. You can also have incoming SMS messages to your Joopz account forwarded to your cell phone for when you aren’t near your Web browser.

A future plan is to create a Web widget so that people can send you SMS messages from a Web site.

There are two types of Joopz accounts: The free Basic account allows you up to 10 outgoing messages per month and unlimited incoming messages. The Premium account adds unlimited outgoing messages, as well as adding enhanced message history and advanced contact management for $2.95 per month or $19.95 per year.

Interestingly there is no advertising or any other kind of monetization of the free accounts: MobileSphere sees the Basic service strictly as a feeder for the Premium service.

When I tried the service, I found I couldn’t send any messages to myself. The reason was that to bridge between the Web and SMS services, Joopz has to interact directly with the cell phone providers which means it has to maintain a database that maps some 270 million cellular subscribers to their providers.

Of course, as I had moved my number from Cingular to T-Mobile about two months ago its database hadn’t been updated with the changes. This really isn’t much of a problem, and it's something MobileSphere can fix within minutes once it knows about it.

The Joopz service will appeal not only to those of us who are simply too old to manipulate minute cell phone keys, but also for high volume users such as service dispatchers or anyone coordinating a team. I suspect there are lots of grandparents and other relatives who might find texting with the younger members of their family much easier using Joopz.

Joopz currently works only for SMS messaging in the U.S. and Canada, but the company plans to expand into Europe and beyond starting this year.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.