[by James Quintana Pearce]
One of the most controversial mobile content companies around is SMS.ac, with a variety of people raising a number of complaints. I spoke with Greg Wilfahrt, Executive Vice President and Co-founder of SMS.ac (and previously director of public relations at MP3.com) to get his response to the complaints… (note: We only discussed consumer issues).
The most common accusation against SMS.ac is that they send spam — or trick people into allowing them to send spam. A lot of people have received invitations from friends to join SMS.ac, and if they don’t opt out the invitations keep coming. This is as a direct result of a feature called “import address book”…
“Our members wanted a way to more easily access people in their address books,” said Wilfahrt. “Import address book is a good function for them so they didn’t have to manually put their address book in.” He points out that people can choose to invite all, some or none of their contacts, and to avoid having the address book imported all they have to do is hit the word ‘next’.
Some people have claimed that SMS.ac don’t make it clear that they are going to access your address book and they signed up accidentally — although if a site asks for your e-mail they want it for a reason, and if it asks for your e-mail and password it is always a good idea to find out what that reason is before you hand it over.
As Greg Wilfahrt put it, the only way someone will receive an invitation “is if someone has you in their address book and has registered on our site”…a registration being “somebody who has gone in and gone through our process and put in a phone number which is a unique identifier”. Joi Ito claims that invitations were sent out to his contact list even though he didn’t finish the registration process, an issue Wilfahrt claimed not to be familiar with. I had contacted an old Mexican friend I had been receiving invitations from to see what he thought of SMS.ac, and he replied that he didn’t know what it was. Wilfahrt was able to show me the account created when my friend signed up (although it didn’t look like it had ever been used) so he had gone through the process.
An El Salvadorian friend told me that he tried to sign up for SMS.ac but couldn’t understand the process because it was in English, and when I thought about it all the invitations I have received were from friends who didn’t have english as their first language. Greg Wilfahrt confirmed that SMS.ac had other languages enabled (Portugese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Dutch and Arabic with 10 more promised by Sept 23rd) but I don’t know how obvious this is to people signing up from an invitation. (After a fair bit of study for this post I saw the options at the bottom of the screen).
So, should these invitations be considered spam? I doubt they break the law, but there is some question over whether people have the right to give a company personal details of a third party. I also doubt whether the second-fourth invitations do any good. I think that letting your users invite their friends is a good idea. I even think that giving them the chance to import their address book is a good idea, although it shouldn’t be part of the sign-up process. Further, giving people the ability to send out an automated invitation to everyone in their address book can be justified — but after one invitation the rest should have to be written and sent by hand. If a friend wants me in SMS.ac that much they can write to me themselves, or even call me.
The other complaints that come up are over the issue of premium SMS. A lot of the comments around the web (such as at Russell Beattie’s post) are full of people complaining that they didn’t know they would receive premium messages and that they are losing all their credit. Other comments are from people who have signed up and opted out of all the lists, and they don’t receive any messages.
| “We didn’t come into this industry to be a quick hit and leave, we’re in this for the long haul. You don’t get that by being underhanded.” — Greg Wilfahrt VP SMS.ac |
“Not only are you presented with the payment options during registration but at any time you can find the pricing in the site,” said Wilfahrt. “The only way we can charge is by sending a confirmation code which they have to input (in the site) which tells you you will be charged. We do that manually so there will not be a spam issue.”
That sounds like a double opt-in process, which is ‘best practice’ in the industry. People may be receiving more messages than they expected, in some cases a lot more, but I don’t know whether this is the fault of SMS.ac.
That brings us neatly to the most serious consumer accusation — which I’ve only read in the comments section of articles, so the veracity is highly questionable — that SMS.ac makes it a practice to “seed” groups with controversial messages to generate premium traffic.
“Absolutely false,” said Wilfahrt when I question him on that. “Those clubs are all user created and I’m not sure who would make that accusation but there is no validity to it at all. Besides which we don’t have the infrastructure, it’s not scalable, you can’t make a business model on that. I can tell you from a manager position that that doesn’t happen.” That comes down to a “he said she said” situation, and I personally tend to give the benefit of the doubt in these cases.
The stated intent of SMS.ac is a good one. “You can go in and find people all over the world based on any number of criteria. It’s sort of like groups but on steroids,” according to Wilfahrt. “You can reach out and communicate to people all over the world in 180 countries, from North Korea to Iraq. One of the fastest growing metrics we have is people sending messages internationally.” I’m all for this — I know a lot of people around the world and I think that’s a good thing.
Wilfahrt said the clubs aspect of SMS.ac was just one part of a mobile community. “You can use it for anything you want to use it for. There’s a school in Ireland that uses the SMS function to send parents a message everyday there kid is in school,” he said. “We think that ultimately SMS.ac is a place that you come for anything related to mobile content.” He said the company was currently working with different groups to “help establish a global and mobile-based early warning system.”
From what I’ve read and heard I think SMS.ac has simply tried too hard (and too successfully) to optimize the services they offer for their own benefit…which is of course what every company does, and in this case it creates problems. For example, the ‘import address book’ feature is a good one, but it shouldn’t be a part of the sign-up process and it should have the restrictions I mentioned earlier. Likewise, the groups and message services have value for people who want them, but they should be opt-in for each group/service rather than opt-out.
Obviously this would probably mean less invitations and less revenue, but it’s probably time SMS.ac looked for other ways to commercialize the service rather than through premium messaging.
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