Google India has just introduced a free SMS service called Google SMS Channels that lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages.
If you are based in India and like to subscribe to this site on your mobile phone via SMS, please join the Digital Inspiration SMS channel on Google. You don’t pay anything to send or receive SMS messages using Google SMS Channels.
Google SMS Channels, which seems to have lot in common with SMS Gupshup, is free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.
Families or friends can create private SMS groups on Google SMS channels and stay in touch via SMS without paying any fees to their mobile carrier.
Other than receiving blog RSS feeds via SMS, you may also use the Google SMS service to get news alerts and weather information on your phone.
Another interesting part – you don’t really need a mobile phone to send an SMS to your group as there’s an option in Google SMS channels that lets you can compose and send SMS messages via the web itself. It supports English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.
Google SMS channels currently works only with with phone numbers of India but they are “working towards making this service available to international numbers.” Thanks Amit Somani.
To search for an SMS channel from the mobile phone, just SMS ‘SEARCH ‘ to 9870807070.
To unsubscribe to an SMS channel from the phone, SMS ‘OFF ‘, to 9870807070 where is the name of the channel.
Related: Send SMS Text Messages from Computer via Outlook
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-sms-subscribe-rss-via-sms/4726/
Tags: feature, google sms, sms, Internet
Reader Comments
Seems like last nail in webaroo’s (smsgupshup) coffin
Written by Rohan Deshmukh on 10.01.08
i’m so jealous with india. hope google offer this to malaysian too.
Written by faizal on 10.01.08
Yes..a good service and hope it would continue. Currently they are using 9870807070 as the mobile gateway. This is just a normal sim in a modem which is connected to a server running the SMS receiver/sender components. Quite an easy stuff to do if you have some knowledge of JAVA. Using link library this can be done. But the only problem is slow send/receive rate. I observed that the Google SMS Channels also has a lot of delay in sending SMS. So probably they are running a simple setup.
Also normally telecom companies won’t allow using 10digit mobile numbers for commercially sending SMS. If requires using the 5 digit SMS gateways for commerical purposes and there won’t be any delay in message delivery.
So, I would expect this service to move to the 5-digit series rather than a 10digit mobile number.
Written by KC on 10.01.08
Ya !!
New avtar of SMS GupShup.
Written by N.patel on 10.01.08
Yes, this is excellent! Co-incidentally, I was looking for mobile subscription for my blog and was considering 160by2.com but this came up!
I am testing it but it is not sending updates as of now. Seems it is not fully up & working.
Written by Abhinav Sonkar on 10.01.08
The delay is there just like smsgupshup, no doubt.
The verification code comes instantly but the RSS feeds given come an hour after.
I get this blogs alerts on sms and then only i log on to the site, nice way to know when to check the site
Written by UkMaD on 10.02.08
Mmm..it’s great but we’ll see a lot of SMS Spam. Do you think that it’s necessary an Akismet for SMS? :)
Written by Dario Salvelli on 10.02.08
Hi Amit,
I loved this service, but I have noted that SMS updates do not contains link to articles. Direct links to article could be useful for reading articles using mobile browser as many smart user uses GPRS in India.
I have setup a small script online where you can convert your blogs feed link so that subscribes get direct (and tinyurl) link to articles in SMS updates. If you find it useful, please use it at Digital Inspiration.
Link: link
-Rahul :-)
p.s. If Google offers this option, please update article with detail. Also sorry for spam in that case.
Written by Rahul Bansal on 10.02.08
There is no doubt that Webaroo will dominate market even though this is a google’s product coz of dull and complicated procedure..!
Written by Abhishek on 10.03.08
This is a nice idea by Google. This way they have all our mobile numbers in their database. They can use them to send us “relevant” ads by SMS. This way companies can target “specific” people for their SMS ads.
Don’t know who in Google comes up with these lucrative ideas! I admire them.
Written by Manu on 10.07.08
10 digit number..great..don’t know how many days they will keep it this way. Service seems a bit delayed, but its worth the wait ;)
Written by Krishna on 11.11.08
how to stop receiving messege from 9870807070…
Written by SANDEEP on 01.17.09
how to stop receiving messege from 9870807070
Written by Mukesh on 01.23.09
Yes this is an interesting sms service rather than other sms services. I really like one thing about this service that we can easily join groups using a simple sms for which we just have to pay only Rs.1 or even less. This facility helps to easily join various groups depend on our interest.
Written by Prafull on 03.03.09
Yes it is great that companies like google are liberating people from paying for such simple information.
But at the same time, companies (like Airtel) won’t allow this if they don’t get any part of pie when the consumers are getting something for free.
These companies are gonna stop this one way or the other.
I remember yahoo too provided some informative SMSes to users. But Reliance labelled it a premium service and charged the consumers Rs 3 per SMS (even though Reliance wasn’t playing any role in producing these SMSes and consumers were already paying Reliance to be online).
Hope Google is ready and has got some ideas on this front also.
Written by Sanjeev on 04.11.09
how to stop receiving message from “Google sms channels” particular from “Google news technology” (9870807070).
pls reply to me
4rm
naresh gundeti
Written by naresh on 04.29.09