If you’re wondering why every January you get bombarded with shiny new devices and every March you get bombarded with shiny new applications, you can blame January on the Consumer Electronics Show and March on South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi).
This week, as SXSWi continues, we are seeing a disproportionate amount of good news for the texting world as numerous new products are launched, others are updated, and other are announcing Android apps for their existing offering.
Interestingly, there is no single city that owns or inspires the movement as Fast Society and GroupMe hail from New York City, Beluga (recently bought by Facebook) and TextPlus are from California and Grouped{in} is from Austin.
All of these applications offer group texting, and some even offer social networking integration. The trend toward texting reinforces our long held assertion that social media fatigue causes a desire to go back to the basics and to circle the wagons rather than exert one’s self in the realm of over-networking.
Realtors fit into the group texting trend as end users, and we see this trend as extremely useful for communicating with existing clients (and their spouses, children, parents or anyone else involved they insist upon) and forming almost an impromptu private social network without anyone having to learn a new technology- exactly what we’ve been begging the startup world for.
jay Great Falls
March 14, 2011 at 5:29 pm
beluga rocks! I have never thought about it from a professional standpoint thought. For family and friends it can be especially useful for vacations or road trips because in your “pod” of members each person can share instantly with everybody else in the group their location which is very helpful in many scenarios such as being at a large theme park, at the greater myrtle beach area or even with everybody headed to a restaurant for dinner.
Beluga would definitely be helpful with some clients in terms of having the decision makers on notice in the same pod with their realtor. Cool idea–similar to a group email for many families I work with. It will depend on if both hubby and wife (for example) are texters!