Send an SMS using Gmail for free Now

One morning, I get to work and initiate a chat conversation over Gmail with one of my friends with a Gmail account. So we catchup on how each one’s weekend was, exchange pictures, funny video clips, forwards and the like. Then after 30 minutes, my friend has to go for a  field visit (his a civil engineer) and ofcourse that means shutting down his computer. Gmail then notifies me that he has gone offline and that messages I send will be delivered when he comes online like most chat services.

Gmail-SMS support

After Gmail announced its SMS integration, now Gmail chat client enables me to continue the conservation over SMS and all I have to do is simply add my friend’s phone number(that if it does not exist in the contacts).

The integration is so seem-less that all I have to do is to continue chatting normally on my Gmail while on the other end my friend is notified on their phones that the chat is continuing over SMS and all they have to is hit the reply button for every IM/SMS message they receive from me. When my friend gets back online,the conversation again seamlessly continues over Gmail IM(Instant Messaging) or Gmail chat. No break in communication at all because of one party switching to a different communication platform (like in this case phone or SMS) or using a different device(like a phone or PC).
WOW. We could communicate using email (for long messaging, pictures), chat(for real time communication) and SMS(for offline communication) all on one single interface(gmail).
No need of additional software installations on either sides, No setup charges, No tutorials. It’s simple and obvious and I couldn’t not get any other suitable example of a unified messaging implementation than this.
Now as promised, according to Wikipedia, Unified Messaging (or UM) isthe integration of different electronic messaging and communications media (e-mail, SMS, Fax, voicemail, video messaging, etc.) technologies into a single interface, accessible from a variety of different devices.Now there already awesome messaging systems out there that combine email, IM, voice and even video chatting, but most of them lack SMS integration. This is understandable because for starters unlike other messaging platforms, SMS is not free although its cheap. Secondly SMS runs on the GSM or cellular communication platform which is not open like the lovely internet. So that simply means that for one to have SMS integration in their application, they have to sign agreements with the telecoms.

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However, all this is about to change. Organisations can add SMS integration to their applications by using Mobile Value Added Service Providers(MVAS) SMS gateways. These MVAS already have long standing agreements with the telecoms and some have simple APIs(Application Programming Interface) for their SMS gateways that enable your [messaging] application to send SMS with just a few lines of code. I will not bias your choice in regards to which service provider you would wish to use, but I can recommend you some that I know. For international traffic, you could use clickatell and for local traffic, you could use smsmedia.Smsmedia has a very simple API, that integrating SMS into your [messaging] application could in a matter of hours.As we have more devices come into the market and more messaging technologies being developed, the time to seamlessly integrate all these various platform in away that it won’t really matter to the user which Phone, PC, Network, Application they are using, is now.

 

Image: hardwarezone.com

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