A while ago, I signed up for a few keywords over at TextMarks.com. TextMarks is a free website that allows you to create and manage your own online community entirely through SMS. Just using text messages, you can broadcast messages about where your band is playing or where you’re all meeting to watch the Red Sox game. You can also allow others to broadcast the whole group, or if you don’t want it to get too complicated, you could just include a link to your mobile website.
Once you register with the service, you have to come up with a unique keyword for your own personal network. You want something memorable, short, and easy to type on a mobile device. You know, something like WUBBA. The system will tell you immediately if the keyword is already reserved, but even if your first choice is taken, it’s pretty easy to come up with something that’s still available. One additional hint is to only use the letters a, d, g, j, m, p, t and w. Why? Well, those letters are the first for each button on the typical 9-digit keypad so any word formed with just these letters can be entered quickly on a mobile device. For instance, if I were to create a group dedicated to Irish guitar music, I would probably call it DADGAD instead of GUITAR. You’d be amazed how quickly you can type DADGAD.
Once you have reserved the keyword, then it’s up to you to decide what people get back when they text you. It can be a simple sentence or two, it can point them to a URL, or if you set it up correctly, then it can contain dynamic information. So bands could have it always return the time and date of their next gig, or you could return your latest Twittr entry.
Anyway, after you’ve got a keyword and have sent a few text messages, then you’re ready to get a T-shirt. TextMarks has a fashion arm of their company called Reactee which creates custom T-shirts based on your code. I mean, the SMS stuff is cool, but the T-shirt rocks. Here’s an image of the shirt I had printed along with a datamatrix code that will automatically text WUBBA to 41411 for you:
Good stuff.
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