Now SMS can be sent from Gmail to mobile

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 11 December 2008, 20:02 IST   |    2 Comments
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California: Google's second attempt to launch text messaging from its Web-based e-mail service to mobile phones has come true. Google hopes that the second time will be a charm for a Gmail Labs feature that lets people send text messages to people's mobile phones with the company's Web-based e-mail service. "A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat," said Leo Dirac, a Google product manager, in a blog post Wednesday. Though the feature was launched in the end of October, Google called back to fix the bugs. Currently the newly launched feature is available only in the United States for now. To use it, people must first enable it through Gmail Labs, then they can initiate SMS-based instant message chats by typing in a phone number in the chat box on the left of the Gmail page. People who receive SMS messages from the service will get a return phone number from the 406 area code, which Dirac was happy to point out spells G0O. Each pairing uses a unique phone number, so a person receiving messages can store a the 406 phone number on his or her phone for future use to communicate with that specific person. The Gmail text-messaging feature doesn't work with Google's other instant-messaging options, including the chat gadget that can run on iGoogle or the Google Talk software that can be downloaded and installed on a computer. Behind the scenes, Gmail Chat sends text messages to people's phones from a specific Google phone number--one of about 1,000 the company reserved for the purpose--and each pair of people communicating gets to keep that number for future use. Gmail Product Manager Keith Coleman Coleman told Cnet, because the person who receives the text message can store the Google phone number in his or her address book as a conduit to reach the sender's computer-based Google chat. The phone numbers are recycled, Coleman said; the system works because each person probably won't need more than 1,000 text-message chat contacts. The Google's current move followed by the launch of its Google phone, seems to be a strategy to create stickiness among the customers to utilize Google’s services even in the phones also.