Sunday, November 2, 2008

SMS text messaging for chat service in Gmail pulled back

Those geniuses at Google Labs never rest, they keep on making new services that are useful and easy to use, but this time they've rolled out too soon a new service in Gmail: SMS text messaging for chat.

Just a day before Gmail Labs pulled back the service, Michael Calore from Webmonkey explained how it should work: "Once the option is turned on, start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box and you’ll see the option to send an SMS. ...
When your friend’s name appears in the drop-down list of contacts, you’ll see an option to send them an SMS. You can also hover over or click on anyone in your Chat buddy list to send them an SMS. The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. ...
The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you."

And then on October 31, 2008; Leo Dirac, Product Manager of Gmail Labs announced the reason behind pulling back the SMS text messaging for chat: "Then we found a glitch. When you'd try to turn it on, it wouldn't fully enable. We thought about keeping it out there -- bugs and all -- but the experience wasn't that great. So, in the spirit of Labs, we've pulled SMS chat back to fix it, and we'll get it back out to you as soon as it's ready -- probably within 2 weeks, so stay tuned."

Sources are from Gmail Blog, via Webmonkey, via Switched.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

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