Russell Beattie

I just played with Joopz again, and it absolutely rocks. It's a SMS sending/receiving service that I tried a while ago, but for some reason this time I really grokked how good it is. You just sign up and you can send/receive SMS messages from the website. Unlike other services which just let you send SMS, this one has an Ajax-powered chat like UI.

The thing that impresses me is how feature complete the service is:

* You can send messages to groups as well as individuals - and you can name and re-use the groups later.

* Entering a contact is as simple as renaming a phone number after you sent a message.

* You can send reminders as well at some future time.

* You can turn on SMS forwarding so you start a conversation at your desk, but then get up and go away and still get your messages.

* It has an Outlook plugin and MySpace/Facebook apps as well. (I hope they open up some public API!)

You get 50 messages a month for free, or unlimited messages for $2.95 a month which is not a bad deal at all. If I had any money, I'd definitely sign up for it.

I swear, I described a service that worked exactly like this to Yahoo! when I was doing strategy there. They've been able to do all this stuff for years, but are too invested in integrating SMS with their Mail and IM products that they'd never bother to create a useful standalone service like this - no matter how much it rocks. So sad.

Anyways, Joopz (IMHO) really needs to get some sort of partnerships set up with other sites, not just create plugins or widgets. Any site out there that has groups or networking would be able to really use this sort of service integrated into their back end. Being able to just start "messaging" with a user, and have it arrive where ever they are would be super popular. I like Joopz, but having to navigate there and log in, and then duplicate my contacts is a bit of a burden. (And obviously, I'm not an Outlook user, so that plugin doesn't do much for me).

Regardless of my thoughts about their strategy, Joopz as is right now is a simple and great service and super-complete. Definitely try it out.

-Russ