As I begin my annual end of year reflection process on where I have been, what I have done and how much I have learned a number of experiences stand out in my mind as formative, influential, or just plain fun. One in particular, the ASAE Annual Conference in Chicago demonstrated just how powerful technology can be to connect multiple people in multiple locations all at the same time. This experience came to be known as the Association Backchannel and by using our mobile phones those that participated were able to share our learning experiences, find out where everybody was and make arrangements to meet up on the fly.

The platform chosen to facilitate the exchange was appropriately enough TXTmob. TXTmob was developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protesters at the in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York and was a huge success. It continues to be offered by Tad Hirsch, a researcher at MIT’s Smart Cities Group as a free service. Tad is also coordinating a long overdue upgrade (hopefully to address some of the inconsistencies that me and others in the group experienced as well as to add some new features and refresh the web UI).

A few really cool things about txtMob was that the group administrator could create groups and control who could/couldn’t participate (not that we had restrictive policies, but it is a great feature) in the Mob. An added benefit was the ability to participate in the mob from the web and the fact that the transcript was archived for later reference.

My only complaint about the whole experience using txtMob was the fact that as a Verizon Wireless customer using a MotorolaQ SmartPhone I was unable to participate because for one reason or another either due to my phone, Verizon or the software itself using SMS. I could use the browser on the phone in a pinch if I wanted to send a message and I was able to receive messages flawlessly, but being unable to use it the way it was designed to be used defeated the purpose and took a lot of the fun out of the experience.

The vexing aspect of my problem was a colleague: BMart, had the same phone on the same provider and had no problems whatsoever. However, I also heard complaints from folks that had Blackberry’s experienced similar challenges, so I promised myself that the next time we gathered en enmasse I would help find a few other viable solutions that worked for all people, or at least as many people as possible. I guess the experiment was getting a bit more formal. Accessibility, security and ease of use all became essential requirements.

One solution that I recently stumbled upon was a service called Mozeo. Mozeo leapt on to the scene in 2005 in the hopes of capitalizing on the mobile phone craze by converging the worlds of chat, blogs and text messaging in the mobile environment. Their flagship product Mozeo Go Groups, essentially a mobile chatroom, is mobile group text messaging made easy. The basic premise is that you sign-up, create a group and start sending messages. You send a message and everybody receives it, someone responds and you and everybody else receives it. It’s that simple and it allows you to communicate with your entire circle of friends from your mobile phone.

For comparison sake there are a few other players in this space that are also worth looking at including: Swarm-it, Zemble, Kiboze, 3jam, and Dodgeball. Even one of my favorite persistent presence applications Twitter has similar functionality but, at least in my opinion, Twitter excels in one-to-many messaging as opposed to the more specialized one to few offered by applications like Mozeo. It’s not a matter of it being good or bad, rather just knowing what tool is most appropriate for what you want to accomplish.

If you are looking for group text messaging that is simple and effective Mozeo may be exactly what you are looking for. Mozeo: http://www.mozeo.com.

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