To be honest, my first reaction was “Oh no, not another American Company offering sms short codes to advertisers and thinking that 1. This is new 2. Advertisers were going to fall over themselves to integrate this into their advertisements 3. that similar products have been around for 2 or 3 years in Europe and haven’t worked there either, can be ignored. But having spent a few minutes on the site and chatting to Ariel, this is far from the case and I think what they’re doing is very cool indeed.

Mechanically, TextMarks allows you to go to their site and reserve a keyword or words. You also type in the response you want to send out when people send that word in. Then, when that word is sms’d to 41411, the sender gets back the message you want them to. Very simple – and it’s all free for the time being.

So, as an example, if I want to point you to a post I wrote yesterday on your mobile phone, I could ask you to key in this rather long URL http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2006/08/22/what-should-friendster-do-now/. Or I could ask you to sms MOBH to 41411 and get the link sent to your phone.

One of the neat things about it is that when you’re setting up your keyword/s, the platform allows you to instantly see if the word is available. So, while I type M then O then B, the message says that the word is too short. Then with the H, it suddenly says it’s available. If I was to continue with A, P, P, Y, it then becomes unavailable (I bagged the MobHappy key word too). This is a nice usability feature.

So far, it’s a nice, usable site, but there are other players on both sides of the pond doing similar things. But what sets TextMarks apart is that they are squarely aimed at the consumer User Generated Content angle – not the more obvious B2B advertiser route that everyone else goes after. Their thinking is that they don’t know how people might find this useful, so let’s launch the tool into the wild, give people a few ideas and then sit back and see what they come up with. This strikes me as being a very wise approach, as I’d bet good money that what people end up using this for, won’t be what we might think.

How would you use it? Leave a comment below if you come up with something interesting.

So far (and it is only a few weeks old) people have used it in some cool ways. This blogger is currently travelling in the Arctic Circle and her readers can find out where she is every day by texting wheresdiana to 41411. There’s a restaurant where regulars can subscribe (the site allows subscription, as well as one off responses) to get details of daily specials, or you can get Amazon’s price for a book by sending in the ISBN.

If you’re selling a car, you could put eg FordFocus as a keyword and send people pricing and mileage details. Or put a key word of the address of the house you’re selling on the For Sale board, so people can text for further details, including pictures, available on a wapsite you create.

Potentially the list is endless and we’re only bound by the limits of our imagination.

One of the aspects that fascinates me about mobile is where the phone becomes the link between the real world and the digital one – a virtual mouse, if you like. This application is one way of realising that idea today, in a very practical, simple and usable way, which is available to everyone – or US mobile users for now, anyway.

I think we’ll see some really interesting use cases come out of this, from both “real” users, as well as when the art community starts experimenting and it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

[tags] textmarks, shortcodes, 41411, amazon [/tags]

The real danger, just as in the wider digital music space, is that it will stifle innovation. The mobile platform offers so many possibilities for compelling services — services people will pay for. There’s a reason the innovation is coming from third-party vendors, not the major record labels. You’ve got people like Andrew Lack, the head of Sony Music, telling the court that Grokster and P2P should be illegal because he can’t figure out how to make it work, while smaller acts and labels are using it to boost sales: “”I might as well make as many people fans of our music, whether they illegally download it or not,” says V2 Records President Andy Gershon.

The Economist gets it: “But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry — consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.”

Mark Cuban, a content owner (who also happens to be bankrolling Grokster’s defense) gets it, too: “We are a digital company that is platform agnostic. Bits are bits. We dont care how they are distributed, just that they are. We want our content to get to the customer in the way the customer wants to receive it, when they want to receive it, at a price that is of value to them. Simple business.”

The proposition seems pretty clear: embrace digital technology, support it and utilize it rather than running from it. The payoff is there.