Kiboze.com Launches - Extend IM with Group Text Messaging

Kiboze.com is the first mobile social networking application that has integrated text messaging with the major instant messaging platforms.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 21, 2006 -- Since the emergence of the Internet, E-mail has been known as the "killer application". While E-mail is certainly not an endangered communication medium, it is losing much of its prestige. Today, young people see it as a good way to reach an elder, a parent, teacher or a boss. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favor to instant and text messaging.

But both text messaging and IM are not without their limitations. Unlike E-mail, text messaging today is (largely) a one-to-one communication tool. Sending a single message to a group of friends is rare. If your mobile phone supports the feature, the UI is clunky and charges pile up as telco's tap users for each message sent. IM is similar, the very large percentage of IM conversation are restricted to one-to-one communication. Because of these limitations, and other barriers like pay-per-text, both text messaging and IM have failed to attract any real traction as useful tools for group communication, a major strength of E-mail.

At Kiboze, our inspiration came in December 2005 when Stowe Boyd, the internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies, penned a very influential blog post called "The Buddylist is The Center of The Universe 2.0". Stowe sees the success the IM platforms like AOL Yahoo!, MSN and Google have had in "connecting" the younger generation in their buddylists as the foundation of the future of communications. The point of this post was to emphasize that people would like to continue to use these platforms to manage ALL of their interaction with their friends, whether that's on the computer or on their mobile phone.

We at Kiboze completely agree. If 80% of people between the ages of 14-29 in the US own a mobile phone and the majority of them use text messaging to communicate with peers, wouldn't it make sense to "Extend IM" to the mobile phone through text messaging? Kiboze has done just that. Kiboze has built patent-pending technology that integrates text messaging with the major IM networks like AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and GTalk creating unique functionality that allows Kiboze users to use their existing "buddylists" as a phone book for "group send" text messaging. Now, with a single text message, Kiboze users can reach 5, 10 or 50 of their friends via text message or instant message free of charge.

How's it work?

Step 1 - Using your buddy list, select which friends should receive your Kiboze text messages.

Step 2 - Send a text message to Kiboze

Step 3 - Kiboze delivers that message to all your friends via text message (if they are a registered Kiboze user) or via IM (if they are not).

Now anyone can use the Kiboze service immediately and reach ALL of their friends anywhere, anytime from their mobile phone. More importantly, users are not limited to reaching only those few friends that may have joined the Kiboze mobile network, our IM integration makes all friends available today.

Learn more about Kiboze today by visiting our website at http://www.kiboze.com

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