So you run a website and really like the social software that enables your visitors to interact with things you produce. But you want to take that connection with the crowd to a more mobile position. Perhaps you’d like some sort of arrangement which allows interested parties to send and receive messages to and from your domain, and preferably something that costs you no financial investment to establish. Enter, Zeep Mobile.
What Zeep provides, in short, is an API. Pretty much any developer can implement the API, and do so freely and easily. With “no volume restrictions,” either. How it works is fairly simple.
Everything operates via a five-digit SMS code: 88147. This is used for messages sent out to users of websites and vice versa. The entry of a “website prefix” helps direct inbound communications. And Zeep is said to be able to connect with “all major carriers in the US,” so it’s bound to work for most who fancy the bridge it provides. The only outstanding concern is the cost to receive SMS messages. In the case of site owners, that’s mostly a non-issue. For site users, however, that’s a hurdle that some just won’t jump. Mobile phone users in international reaches may be the beneficiaries of a free-receive promise from their respective carriers, but here in the US, carriers tend to refuse any differentiation between the ins and the outs.
Zeep’sinfluence obviously can only stretch so far, so one will have to take a glass-half-full approach to this. Inasmuch as Zeep serves its first list of clients - website owners - there will be ample cheers for no-pay.
That “free” designation, mind you, has a bit of a condition attached to it. Yes, Zeep’s API is free to use, technically speaking. But that real-world use of the service will work hand-in-hand with something the company calls Zeep Media. That’s where advertisers enter the fold. Zeep states that developers utilizing the API will glean metadata pertaining to SMS-based interaction for the purpose of establishing “an accurate profile of each subscriber’s interests.” It explains to prospective advertisers that this ensures that spots are “always displayed to the right customers.” In other words, “highly targetable campaigns.”
Now,there’s nothing quite so conniving or deceptive about that. Targeting of that sort occurs in many scenarios today. But it is nonetheless good for websites and their creators or managers to keep this in mind when considering an SMS platform to infuse into their operations. I suspect a good portion of Zeep users won’t mind the ads much. Their presence, after all, is only going to increase with time. Still, it won’t taste good to everyone, so it is only appropriate to note.
Courtesy: Mashable
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