Tatango, the ad-supported group SMS service previously known as networkText, spent the last few months in a private beta following a functional and visual overhaul and a round of funding by Bellingham Angel Organization. Now everyone is free to get in on the group texting good times; they’ve opened the doors to the public.
The service is dead simple to use, as it should be. I made the jump from accountless bum to en masse messaging mogul in all of about 2 minutes. Sign up, invite some friends (they have to opt-in, else this thing would be a spam machine), and you (or anybody you dub as a group admin) are able to SMS the entire group at once, either from …. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Tatango’s service is great! Especially for groups like sports teams for practice/game times and clubs for just about any annoucement you need to make. I have used Tatango for my fraternity and it helps in organizing everyone in terms of meetings, events, and reminders about upcoming deadlines. Even simple things like the days lunch menu can be sent in seconds. Everyone always has their cell phone with them and it is the easiest way to mass communicate!
We just started using Tatango for our group texting needs. The user interface is one of the best and easiest systems that we have found on the web.
The ability to message your entire group from your cell phone is a very handy feature and lifesaver if an event has to moved, changed, or canceled at the very last minute.
Subgroups make it easier for our group to target a specific demographic that make the texts more relevant to our group members age & gender.
Derek and his team at Tatango have hit a home run with simplifying without compensating features in the group text messaging industry.
Hey, thanks for the great comments, glad you are liking the service! Yea, the feature that allows a group leader the ability to send a group text message from their own mobile phone is perfect for when you aren’t by your computer. Glad you are utilizing that feature!
Thanks again for the comments, they are greatly appreciated!
- Derek Johnson (CEO Tatango)
So…it’s just group text messaging? Don’t a million ‘companies’ already offer this…
Give me $5 grand and I’ll build this, all you need is a short code and to pay for the carrier codes and you too can have a group text messaging company.
Get a clue bozo! Do you know that you can’t build this? I’ll tell you why you can’t build this; because nobody is going to give you $5 grand to build it!
Instead Tatango will spend way more time and money on solving this problem, build it (oh wait! They already built it!), and kick the app out on servers to that people can start using it … today.
I don’t even know why I wasted my breath telling you that.
Zemble is similar to Tatango. UPOC spams you to death once you join, so isn’t an option. There aren’t really that many good options for group texting.
…and the cpms on SMS are what now? can’t be more than a few cents–good luck with the tens of millions of text messages to generate that first million!
Miles, that is correct, the CPM’s are only a few cents for each text message ad. Since our beta launch in late 2007 we have done over 25 million text messages and we are growing at an extremely high rate right now. Any other questions/comments please post.
- Derek Johnson (CEO Tatango)
I love this service! Use it for my Britney Spears website BreatheHeavy.com - in which I send hundreds of texts with breaking news to my readers cell phones.
@Jason - Indeed, there’s a pretty low barrier of entry into the SMS market. Where we’ve managed to differentiate ourselves is with lots of testing and design.
To protect the users, we took a step back and thought of any way the system could be abused, and locked them down. A lot of other tools can be used to spam mobiles, and thus if they ever grow large enough, they’ll have a lot of trouble trying to keep it under control.
We spent a lot of time in user interface testing, ensuring the smoothest possible flows for the group administrators, to minimize the effort they need to manage their group from a browser or their phones.
Our engineering team has also done a very good job of building a scaleable, fault-tolerant architecture - in the few minutes while I wrote this, we sent well over 30,000 texts with lots of headroom left.
A comparison would be Twitter - You could build a Twitter clone for very cheap (I threw one together over a weekend in college on a lark), but once you’ve got this piece of software that’s identical to an existing product, how are you going to get users to migrate over to yours, and/or choose your product over the pre-existing one?
Lastly, we’ve got a lot of traction - we’re doing hundreds of thousands of texts every day, even while in private beta. It seems that people are liking the service pretty well so far.
Drop me a line at apike at tatango dot com if you’d like to chat more later. I’ll be watching this thread for quite a while too if you’d like to keep chatting here.
Tatango is awesome!
I have used their service extensively.
But I think I found a new company with a plan to “one up” them!
I just starting using a new service called SayType to sent text and e-mail’s hands free for when I am driving. This service is faster and more consistently accurate than any other voice recognition technology I have tried that’s on the market. (Jott, Mobivox, Naturally Speaking etc.) Plus, they claim to use technology only, not human transcribers/translators.
They use an address book that is super simple to set up and navigate.
Options include change the language you want to send your contact a message in. It’s crazy!
I just spoke with Say Type’s media contact, who informed me that the ability select to send group text or e-mail messages on the go is coming soon.
Hope this was as helpful and informitive as it was to me:)
Tatango is such a helpful tool for the organizations I am a part of. It makes communication fast, easy, and efficient. Their technical support is second to none and so is their service. I recommend it to anyone who is part of an organization or group that needs info sent out 5 days before hand or 5 minutes.
It’s a pretty innovative service, and it really simplifies my day to day communications with my clients. I’m hoping to see more from this service in the near future, hopefully it continues to extend its services even further.
Pretty Solid for a start-up.
Thanks for the kind words, J - we’ve got a lot of new features rolling out in the coming weeks.
If you’re looking for anything specific, definitely drop us a line, and we’ll see if it fits in with our dev timeline at all.
Thanks for the comment. You will definitely see more from Tatango in the near future! We have some really cool and unique features that are currently in the pipeline, so stay tuned. Here is our blog address to stay up to date on all our launches: http://www.tatango.com/blog
- Derek Johnson (CEO Tatango)
This is an AWESOME service! Perfect and convenient for social circles when you’re trying to set something up. When I’m at work, I can just take a quick break, log in and get a bunch of people together for a happy hour. Sweet design guys, keep up the good work. Also, any plans for an iPhone app?
iPhone app’s definitely on the todo list, watch our blog in the next few weeks.
Great service.. I used it with my student organization and it worked phenomenal!
Very simple, very easy to use… also very affordable!
Yea, free is always a good price point!
Tatango is The Only SMS Service That Should Be Used in the WORLD!! The staff is amazing. You can get a response about technical issues instantly. My company is VERY PLEASED with the proven results of Tatango.
Looks like the PR squad, along with the astro-turfers are out in full force. Sounds decent, but quit over-selling at a tech blog like tc (get cheesy with the main stream media).
Sorry, yea we have a ton of fans on Facebook and MySpace and it looks like a lot of them are coming over to comment and give their support.
Good job D-roc. Making the front page of Tech Crunch is definitely an accomplishment. Rock on!
I hate when pretty cool little websites have their employees commenting all over tech blogs. Congrats and all on getting on TC, but never, ever say ‘oh I guess we have a ton of fans on facebook and myspace and they must really love us’ That’s just dumb.
30 comments, or whatever is not a ‘ton of fans’ Don’t pretend you didn’t tell all your friends on facebook to go ‘check out and comment on techcrunch’
I bet all the positive posts are from within a ten mile radius of wherever you’re located. If they’re all from your company’s IP address that’s called astroturfing. If you made it on techcrunch then you’re good enough that a lot of people like you…you don’t need to have the employees all over the comment board.
Derek can address your specific beef with his comment, but users within a few miles actually consist of way less than 5% of our userbase.
Here’s a map of our betatesters, week one. We’ve pretty much covered the nation by now.
http://tatango.com/blog/wp-con.....ure-14.png
We’re based up near Seattle.
As far as Facebook goes, we’ve got a pretty big Tatango-specific following there too;
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tatango/7481066414
We stick around on comment boards because we like maintaining interaction with people interested in what we do - I believe that’s one of the reasons we have such vocal proponents and fans.
We give out our cell numbers, answer emails, follow forums, and do our absolute best to make sure we’re aware of what our users are talking about regarding us.
I agree that the vocality of positive responses certainly looks suspicious, but I believe it’s just revealing that we care about and take care of our users and fans, and they in turn care about us. Got a suggestion, thought, rant, or anything else you want to vent to Tatango? Both Derek and myself respond to emails, calls, and texts around the clock, our cellphone numbers are in our signatures, we’re easily reachable via IM, and we’re always on twitter.
Anything our users want to vent to us, we’re here for them, and it seems they’re here for us as well.
Oh, and glad you think the site’s pretty cool!
So you have a loyal following, that’s great. But, don’t go too pollyanna on us cynical tech folk (some of us are still working this evening, albeit somewhat leisurely). Most of us *here* read lots about new companies everyday and your service is not some ground-breaking tech here (as you’ve noted). Please understand your audience and show us some respect b/c you certainly can gain good will here. So, just be confident in your service and be as passionate and responsive in your one-to-one interactions, but save it in the one-to-many “forum” that is the tc comment section.
And now my question:
Please explain why I can’t use twitter to freely (and ad freely) provide the same exact experience? With twitter, I must ask my friends to send a short message from their mobile to a short code which is pretty easy. It seems tatango will let me blast my friends allowing them to simply reply to “enroll”. Other than that, I can’t see why I’d use tatango to manage my 4 groups that I already have on twitter (who have never heard of twitter). My group members can’t reply to everyone unless I explain to them to go to twitter and how it works, but it hasn’t been needed yet. Am I missing something?
After reading through your site, I stand corrected. This write-up (and that on mobilecrunch) are short on details. It is written as if we’ve never heard of services that allow for “group SMS”, and this service can’t be reviewed without noting similarities to TWITTER.
Tatango= Twitter - (open API) - (RSS feed) -(xmpp integration) + (monetization strategy)
You can get the privacy ‘features’ with twitter using the protected updates (i.e. access control list). twhirl, tweetdeck, and IM (when working) make it a dream to deal with from your desktop.
You all are not the “
I didn’t say your users were all local, I said that all the ‘alleged Astroturfing’ all over the comments here was most likely coming from a 10 miles address around your area.
Again, if you’re on techcrunch you obviously have users and a product that worthwhile. I just find the pandering in the comments ridiculous and agree with Skip…just makes founders look immature.
Again with the following on facebook comments…checked out all your ‘fans’ and it looks like your founder has more ‘friends’ than tatango has ‘fans’
Just build something cool (looks like you did) get some users (looks like you’ve got them) and stop talking about yourselves and KEEP building cool things.
My two cents.
You the man JC!
I think it is funny they are going after my friends that wouldn’t get twitter, but they are trying to use GetSatisfaction, which my friends would think makes no sense and hate worse than twitter/
Sounds good . There is a great new start-up that just came out . It is all self serve and it is also fully automated . It supports all types text ads, banners and video ads.For publishers , it offers the highest split of earnings you can find out there and much more. It caters to web and mobile Publishers and Advertisers . Web and Mobile Publishers can earn money easier than ever and registering is FREE. Please check it out : http://www.webmob-ad.com
Hey Skip,
For some reason, the threading’s not being friendly and I can’t directly respond.
Not to worry, you’re not the only one still chugging away, most of us here are still at the office. (Ironically enough, I’m actually working on our RSS capabilities and some of the API stuff).
We get the Twitter comparison fairly often, but the only solid similarity is the fact that both Twitter and Tatango have a strong SMS component. I find that Twitter is very “member-centric”, in that at it’s core it was built as a tool to update your friends and social groups about your own personal status.
Conversely, Tatango is intended for the “leader” of a given group to update the group about events appropriate to the group. It comes back to the age-old problem of signal vs. noise - if you have a 100-person fraternity, it might not be the best thing to let them all send messages about.
As with everything, both tools can be massaged around to do all kinds of things - Twitter is totally capable of managing and communicating with a group, and Tatango is also capable of allowing everybody in a group to send messages.
Twitter starts to stumble as the groups get larger and as the churn rate goes up, just as Tatango starts to be overkill as the groups shrink down and become more close-knit. If I’ve got a more commercial group, it would be more difficult to bend Twitter to my needs, just as if I want to use twhirl to update my Tatango group, I’m up a creek.
IMHO, they both fill different voids in the marketplace - Twitter works very well to keep a close, tight-knit circle of friends in the loop, whereas Tatango works better to keep a larger, more structured group connected.
BTW, Well brought up on the Pollyanna principle - nobody learns anything from groupthink. Keep the hard criticisms coming, it’s always useful to have people point out where they think our offering is weak, so we can work on making those points stronger. Look for RSS in the next few weeks, and our API getting more and more fleshed out constantly.
Fair enough, I can appreciate positioning. It certainly seems like you are going after different demographics/ personality types even though your services can be used for identical purposes. In fact, my friends would have an easier time understanding tatango than twitter.
Sounds like you are managing your customers and willing to iterate, that bodes well. I don’t bother being critical with people I find slow in comprehension, it just hurts their feelings and accomplishes nothing.
that’s a great news..
Wadja.com has a similar function. I use it to send SMS’es when I’m at my pc. It’s for free, and it’s faster than typing it on your GSM.
Extra advantage is you can use it for international SMS’es as well.
Hi Guys
If you like Tatango try http://phone.com/phonedot where one can send a text messages to up to ten people at once and where the message is sent as voice to any phone (even home phones). Plus you can have a longer message, select from about thirty funny voices (including Bush called Dubya) and add sound effects.
No registration is required.
Spam is limited by the fact that you can only send few Phone Dots every time.
NM
Does the service allow to send messages worldwide ?
Tatango is currently only available in the US, but we are working on expanding the availability of the service very soon. Keep up to date on our progress on the Tatango blog here: http://tatango.com/blog/
This sounds like a great utility and appears to be very user-friendly.
Alvira Khan
Florida Atlantic University
FAU Alumna
What makes this any different or better than TextMarks?
Also, I thought the video on the blog was a little cocky with the young gun-slinger founder plopping down in the chair, pointing at me, “25M messages, leader, shoutouts to the BFFs, hit me up”
haha… good point about their video. This startup is a little full of themselves
hahaha… No, just extremely confident in our product. Have you had a chance to check it out?
- Derek Johnson (CEO Tatango)
GOOD
LOVE THE IDEA! if you guys like this, there’s also:
http://www.vingtalk.com/cpp