Kiboze.com - extend IM with group text messaging

I had a note in from Jay Cody, co-founder and President of Kiboze, telling me about his new service which has recently launched in the States.

Kiboze extends your instant messaging experience with group text messaging.  Essentially it works in this manner:  Send one text message to the Kiboze service and it will spread it to your nominated friends wherever they are on whatever device. 

There’s a lot going on in this space and if you’ve even the hint of an interest, I suggest you hop over and get yourself an account to try it out. 

Jay wrote what I found to be a rather extensive positioning overview of the Kiboze concept so I asked if I could reproduce it here and he agreed:

Since the emergence of the Internet, E-mail has been known as the "killer application". While E-mail is certainly not an endangered communication medium, it is losing much of its prestige. According to Martha Irvine of the Associated Press, "E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder, a parent, teacher or a boss. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favor to instant and text messaging."

But both text messaging and IM are not without their limitations. Unlike E-mail, text messaging today is (largely) a one-to-one communication tool. Sending a single message to a group of friends is rare. If your mobile phone supports the feature, the UI is clunky and charges pile up as telco’s tap users for each message sent. IM is similar, the very large percentage of IM conversation are restricted to one-to-one communication. Because of these limitations, and other barriers like pay-per-text, both text messaging and IM have failed to attract any real traction as useful tools for group communication, a major strength of E-mail.

Several small mobile start-ups have tried to solve this problem by offering a "group send" for text messaging but they have suffered from low end-user adoption rates because they are built as "closed networks". These closed networks require a person to re-connect with all their friends before they can use the service. During the current social networking craze, today’s youth have already connected to their friends using services like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, as well as the IM platforms, Email accounts and mobile phones. The burden of managing one’s relationships in all of these tools has become overwhelming and new services that rely on it’s users to re-connect yet again are paying the price.

In a typical scenario, a user, with curiosity peaked, joins one of these "closed" mobile networks only to discover the service saying you can’t use the service because "You have no friends"! After users get over the initial shock, they have to decide if the time and effort to convince their friends to sign-up and test the application is worthwhile. The lack of a pre-defined "buddy lists" has significantly stunted the growth of these mobile social networks.

Kiboze Connect was founded to solve this exact issue.

Our inspiration came in December 2005 when Stowe Boyd, the internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies, penned a very influential blog post called "The Buddylist is The Center of The Universe 2.0". Stowe sees the success the IM platforms like AOL Yahoo!, MSN and Google have had in "connecting" the younger generation in their buddylists as the foundation of the future of communications. The point of this post was to emphasize that people would like to continue to use these platforms to manage ALL of their interaction with their friends, whether that’s on the computer or on their mobile phone.

We at Kiboze completely agree. If 80% of people between the ages of 14-29 in the US own a mobile phone and the majority of them use text messaging to communicate with peers, wouldn’t it make sense to "Extend IM" to the mobile phone through text messaging? Kiboze has done just that. Kiboze has built patent-pending technology that integrates text messaging with the major IM networks like AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and GTalk creating unique functionality that allows Kiboze users to use their existing "buddylists" as a phone book for "group send" text messaging. Now, with a single text message, Kiboze users can reach 5, 10 or 50 of their friends via text message or instant message free of charge.

How’s it work?
Step 1 – Using your buddy list, select which friends should receive your Kiboze text messages.

Step 2 – Send a text message to Kiboze

Step 3 – Kiboze delivers that message to all your friends via text message (if they are a registered Kiboze user) or via IM (if they are not).

Now instead of getting a message saying "You have no friends", anyone can use the Kiboze service immediately and reach ALL of their friends anywhere, anytime from their mobile phone. More importantly, users are not limited to reaching only those few friends that may have joined the Kiboze mobile network, our IM integration makes all your friends available today!

Check it out over at www.kiboze.com.