official textPlus blog

We have a new internet website!

Go check out the hot, new, slick, and oh so sexy:

http://www.textPlus.com

O Canada!

“When is textPlus coming to Canada?”

We get asked that a bunch.  We love all of your feedback, because it helps us decide what to work on, where to put our teams focus, and well…it’s super cool to be able to talk to people who use something we work reallllly hard on.

So thank you.

Well, it’s beta time again!!!

This time, we need YOU Canada.

Do you live in Canada, have a canadian carrier?  Click here to sign up for the textPlus Canada beta team.

textPlus now on Android

A funny thing happened in 2009.  A new type of phone hit the market.  Something with the odd name of Android.  It’s an operating system built by someone we’re all familiar with - Google.

While we’re super fans of iPhones and iPod Touches, the Droids are pretty cool, and we wanted to get involved.  So what did we do?

Built textPlus for Android, and launched it yesterday.  You can read about it here.

Go to the Android Marketplace and download it today!  If you’re not an Android user and are lovin’ the iPhone and Touch, tell your Android friends.

(and as usual, please hop into our community and tell us what you think!)

Happy Holidays - Now take over our app, please.

We hope that everyone is having a safe and happy holiday season this year.  The whole team wants to thank you for such an awesome year of texting.  We’re working super hard to make textPlus THE best texting app there is.  And more (well, plus).

When you open the app today you’ll notice some nifty little artwork we whipped up to tell ya how we feel:

You know how Google has different graphics sometimes when you visit them to search?

We’re going to use this space for the same thing.

One difference though, YOUR art is going to be used.

Yes, YOURS.

We have a few requirements and guidelines, but thats it.  Get creative!

Requirements:
- Format: PNG
- Size: 320x416 
- no transparency
- incorporate a plus sign

Suggestions:
- has something to do with texting
- topical, based on current news or events
- sneak your textPlus address onto it so everyone knows who made it!

We of course have final decision on who makes it in (and once you submit, the graphic belongs to GOGII), but have a go at it and email submissions to drew AT gogii.net

If you get picked, we’ll contact you, and then you’re on your way to stardom!  Or, textdom as it were.  You’ll be able to tell all of your friends to keep an eye out for your work of art as they open the textPlus app.

Plus, you don’t want to leave it up to me to make artwork, because I’d end up doing something like this:

Sad, huh?

_drew

textPlus 2.1 - Communities and more.

First of all, if you haven’t upgraded to our latest version of textPlus (2.1), please go here and do so!

The team has been working hard, we’ve been listening to all of your feedback…and we’ve made some changes we hope you like :)

New in textPlus version 2.1:

Personal Communities:
- Make one for your class and one for your clique.
- Name it and save it.  Even non-app users can join the group by texting the Community name to the number 60611

New tricks:
- Refresh buttons for faster messaging
- Swipe to kick people out of conversations
- Re-invite friends who may have missed your texts
- Dedicated servers and bug fixes to make textPlus faster and even more reliable!

What are “Communities” and why are they cool?

You already know (hopefully), that you can have a group conversation using textPlus.  It’s like reply-all in email or a chatroom.  Everyone gets all of the messages, even if they’re not using the app.  You asked for a way to manage these “groups”, so we created our “Communities” feature.

You can pick, save, and keep, a unique name for a group of people that you want to text all of the time or get a text message out to fast.

Our communities feature is great to keep your group in the loop. Roomies, classmates, the morning carpool, mom/dad/grandma, or use it like we do here at GOGII for work stuff.

For example, a few of us here at the office are from Philly (myself included).  So whenever anything Philly related happens, we update each other.  A few weeks ago, I was at Allen Iverson’s first game back as a Sixer.

More features are coming to communities soon, as well as the rest of textPlus, so please keep your feedback coming over on our support site at GetSatisfaction!

We do listen, and your feedback helps us decide on which new features to work on first.

Follow us on Twitter too for interesting tidbits - we’re @textPlus

Blackberry Beta Users Needed!

Like to text?

Blackberry user?

Want to try out something awesome and rad and give us feedback and suggestions about it?

Well then come on down.

Join the textPlus Blackberry Beta!

Communities and why they’re important.

Communities go way back…before the internet! *gasp!*

The dictionary says a community is: a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

Interesting.  So a community is a small, medium or large group that shares some of the same interest and background.

Your family is a community. Your sewing club is a community.  The people you work with is a community.  Heck, the girls you go to mall with every Saturday…they’re a community too.

I have personal experience with a bunch of different communities…online and offline.  Recently, one of the communities I was introduced to was the Cancer community, by way of the organization LIVESTRONG.  Also, I’m a geek, so I’ve been involved in communities that are into podcasting, or building stuff on the web, listening to music…you get the picture

How do we keep in touch with our communities?

Well, some of you remember those things called Newspapers.  And local TV keeps you up to date on your community.   A channel like ESPN keeps the community that is interested in sports up to date.

The internet is an awesome way to interact with communities too.  You have your friends and groups on Facebook, the people you follow on Twitter, and of course email.   These are great ways to stay active, involved, and informed.

It’s all about the people

So communities are my passion, staying connected to people…keeping up to date on the world around me, especially when it comes to my interests.

I’m a texter, and I work for a company who builds cool technology around texting.  So clearly, we had to find a way to make texting community friendly.

Because right now, it’s not.

1 on 1 texting, and maybe the occasional blast out to 3 people letting them know you wont make it to the show is the extent of how we utilize texting to stay in touch with our communities.  And that’s not really social.

textPlus aims to solve that problem.

Texting is great for instant communication.  It really doesn’t get anymore instant than that, I mean other than shouting in a room full of people :)  Research shows that texts get read and answered infinitely faster than email and phone calls, or posts to a message board.

Remember that sewing club?  Why not create a Community where if you want to ask your fellow sewers a question, blast it out to them…via text message.  That means no matter where they are or what they’re doing, they’ll get to reading the message.  No computers needed, no WIFI needed, just what they have already…their phone.  And when they respond, everyone sees it.

The next version of textPlus is going to let you do just that.

Twitter is great (I love it), but it’s wide open. You follow 500 people, but are they all interested in the same things?  More than likely not.  It’s hard to pull out the information that matters most to you when its all thrown in together.  And there’s apps and lingo and geeky things, and you know…signing up.

With the next version of textPlus, you can create a community for your weekend drinking buddies, one for your family, one for your blog, even local news could set up a community on textPlus to share news and have conversations with the people who care the most.

That’s why communities rock.

And that’s why textPlus is going to make it easier to keep everyone in the loop.  The people in your community don’t even have to sign up to a website or register anywhere.  Send a message in a way that you KNOW will get through…with texts.

_drew

Realtime, Realfast, Realmobile. Just text.

At GOGII, we’re fascinated by mobile technology…obviously.  We’re dedicated to making texting better.  We talk about “Next Generation Texting” a lot.

What does that mean?  It means taking a technology that everyone uses and that has been around for a long time…SMS/texting…and then doing something revolutionary with it.  Building on top of it, making it better and making it more useful.

When we talk about how we can do that with our app textPlus, we talk about groups.  Being able to send a note out to 4 people about say, going to a movie…and letting everyone respond.  Whether they have the textPlus app or not.

If you were to text a group of people from an iPhone or any other phone with texting  capabilities it would go something like this:

Me: Hey everyone, what movie do you want to see?
Joe: New Moon
Tricia: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Zack: I don’t know, what movies are out?
Scott:  I don’t care, what does everyone else want to see?

See the problem there?  Not everyone saw Joe and Tricia’s response, only I did.  That’s how texting works (or doesn’t work) for groups right now.

textPlus has fixed that with our reply-all approach to texting.  A conversation in textPlus goes something like this:

Me: Hey everyone, what movie do you want to see?
Joe: New Moon
Tricia: Saw New Moon twice, how about Fantastic Mr. Fox?
Zack: I like movies about animals
Scott:  Sweet, I’m in for Fantastic Mr. Fox!

The difference?  In realtime, everyone was able to participate in the conversation (from wherever they were at the time) and a consensus was made.  I was the only one using textPlus. Joe was on a Droid, Tricia was on her Blackberry, and Zack and Scott were using older flip phones.     Nobody had to be signed up for a website, not everyone needed to use an app, or know how to do anything geeky.   Just text.

Realtime.  Instant.  Mobile.  But most importantly, easy.

In the next few days, we’ll be sharing the next steps we’re taking to build realtime mobile communities built around texting.

Until then, I’m on my way out the door so just text me.

_drew

textPlus Upgrades for fasterness.

We’re always keeping an eye on the feedback you’re giving us, and always looking for ways to make textPlus better.

One of the ways to do that is to make sure textPlus is running snappy and fast and making it as reliable as possible.

We took steps yesterday to make that happen.  textPlus has a new home, check it out!

In this picture, our team marvels at textPlus’ new cage.   We’re in a start of the art hosting facility to make sure your texts get to where they’re supposed to be.

And FAST.

Some of you are experiencing some issues leftover from our move.  Most of that has to do with those of you using the app with a WIFI connection.   Specifically, internet providers like Comcast haven’t been super fast keeping up with our move.  They’re still looking for our old home first, which might have caused you a few “oops” errors.   You might want to give your iPhone or Touch a reboot as well, we’re told that helps.

Rest assured, that those issues will work themselves out as the hours go by if they haven’t already, like a lot of you are saying.