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Webaroo’s SMS Gupshup goes under the knife

August 2, 2007 · Posted in India Social Networking, India Web 2.0, Mobile India

Webaroo’s SMS Gupshup is launching v2.0 of their group SMS service (my earlier review here). Along with major cosmetic design changes, new features include:

Send SMS’s from the Internet to your groups
Create and share your own SMS blog with your friends
Social networking features like inviting friends, group management etc. can now be done via the web also

The new design is definitely quite refreshing and a stark contrast to their earlier design.

The couple of features that I’d be interested in seeing from SMS Gupshup:

1) Webaroo SMS Gupshup labels itself as a group SMS service - however, as of now, only the group creator can post messages to the group. Other members of the group can only receive messages. So, in its current form, the term ‘Group SMS’ may feel like a misnomer depending on how look at it. The ability for other users to be able to post to the group seems to be a very important feature. As an example, say I have a gang of 10 friends who I’d like to stay connected with, using SMS Gupshup. In the current scenario, I’d have to be subscribed to 9 different groups to stay abreast of what each of them is upto. On the contrary, if we could have created a single group (say Mygang) and all the members could post to the group, I’d have to subscribe to just one group.

2) Ability to import contacts - friends from existing social networks

As per company sources, they have about half a million users of the service and on an average send close to a million messages per day. There is no revenue share agreement with the operators, so Webaroo does not get any percentage cut from the operators for each SMS sent using their service. They are beefing up their advertiser relationships and hope to rope in several new advertisers.

The new version of the site goes live over the weekend.