Tagg.in | SMS Group messaging | Micro Blogging | Sports & News updates on SMS

It made a very positive impact on my mind at the first look itself. What an interface, looks really great & simple. Coming to service, it apparently looks to me as combination of smsgupshup & twitter! Tagg.in claims itself as SMS group messaging system as well as micro blogging platform. But they are not simply telling like that.

Firstly registration is very easy, you have to fill only three feilds, email, password & verification code (are you human?). You can activate your mobile phone later, but updates via SMS is what looks great. Registration process can also be completed via SMSs. So you need not to have internet to use this service, just remember SMS short codes & their number. Tagg.in uses local number 99801 99801 so you will be less charged by service provider to update via SMS.

After simple registration process, you can create your own group termed as TAGGtivity. Updates to group can be sent using web interface or SMSs. Your followers can follow your updates in either medium. You can subscribe to other popular groups like CricScores, BrkgNews, SportsNews, JokesGuru…etc to get free updates.

Cons:

• You cannot add your friends mobile numbers to your group, they have to sign up or have to send a message from their mobile to follow your updates. SMSGupShup has a feature where you can add mobile numbers of your friends to your group & start sending messages straight away.
• Updates can be made via only two mediums, SMS & web. I still love twitter because it provides lot of ways to update. May be they are going to add these features in final release, this is still in alpha.
• Lack of badges to display your updates on your blogs or web pages.

I feel it still lacks in features when compared with it’s competitor. Let’s wait and see what features they are going to bring in final release.

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As my Twitter network is growing, I’m discovering interesting new people. Aalaap Ghag is one of them, who is also the founder of a new online service called LinkBunch.

You might have heard or used TinyURL which shortens lengthy URLs into smaller ones, which can be used in places where space is a constraint. LinkBunch is a step ahead - it lets you create a single, small URL out of multiple links. The LinkBunch link is easy to remember and share, due to its short length.

Some Web 2.0 services have limited amount of characters that you can input. In Twitter the limit is 140 characters per tweet. If you wanted to share multiple links services like Twitter, you will run out of space. LinkBunch can be very useful in this case.

LinkBunch is still in Beta and the full set of features is not yet implemented. As I discussed with Aalaap, user accounts will be integrated into this service. With an account, a user can manage bunches created by him. Managing includes adding links, removing links, editing links in a current bunch, deleting old bunches if not required. User need not to go through sign up process, as this service will be OpenID enabled.

I have created a bunch with URLs of my blogs and social networking profiles, this is an example LinkBunch: http://linkbun.ch/4ma

To create your own Link Bunch go to linkbun.ch

Twitter is a service which ask you “what are you doing?”. But it’s deviated a lot from this theme & evolved as a big microblogging platform. You can just update whatever you want through web, IM or Phone. Others can follow your updates & can receive updates via all three mentioned mediums.

Twitter has millions of users & finding people from your location to interact is difficult as there is no such option provided right now. Abhinav Sarkar, a forth year student in IIT Kharagpur, created a script just for fun. But the script is really useful, it is written in python & uses Twitter API. Primarily script crawls Abhinav’s Indian friends on twitter by looking at location entry as “India”, “Bangalore”, “Mumbai”…etc into his database. Later script crawls his friend’s Indian friends & so on, the list keeps building. Finally, the result is a directory of all Indian Twitterers!

This list can be accessed at
http://abhinav.sarkar.googlepages.com/indiantwitterers.html

Great work Abhinav

Update:

Abhinav has created a twitter bot which follows, collects tweets from all Indian Twitterers & re-tweets them. So, you can follow this bot to follow all Indian twitterers tweets. Follow this bot at http://twitter.com/IndiaTwit