I first learned of Tatango after receiving a message from them on Twitter. At the time, Tatango’s service hadn’t been released, but it was accepting emails for its beta. Being of curious nature I decided to sign up. After using Tatango, I was quite surprised at how well it works. Tatango, in short, is a super easy way to text message large groups of people. Example, a soccer team has had a reschedule a game and instead of calling everyone on the team, you can send text messages to everyone with a click of a button.
I was lucky enough to ask Adrian Pike, Tatango’s CTO, a few questions. Even more surprising is some of the new features that are in the works for Tatango.
R3FRESH: Like Twitter, I’m having trouble explaining what exactly Tatango is/does. Could you explain?
PIKE: Tatango, quite simply, offers a way for groups to communicate through their mobile phone. With Tatango, a leader of a group, large or small, can send one message directly from their computer or mobile phone to all of their members updating them on meeting times, changes in schedule, alerts, or any message that needs to be delivered to group members, instantaneously.
We initially started with it as a tool for groups with a younger demographic (Greek organizations, sports teams, college clubs, etc.) to replace the age-old phone tree, but pretty quickly we realized that it works for all types of social groups, from artists to zoo employees.
R3FRESH: To receive text messages from Tatango you need to be invited. Will there be a way to send text messages to people that haven’t been invited? If so, will you be able to import your contacts from Facebook or Google?
PIKE: We’re right now working on a Facebook application that will help in bringing in users from Facebook, and users can send email invites to their contact lists from Gmail and other webmail products. We hope to have the Facebook app launched within a month.
One of the central things we kept in mind when we were designing and building Tatango was how to keep it from being abused. In some early tests, we tried the ability of sending SMS-based invites, and unfortunately they raised a few problems.
Firstly, a lot of our less technically savvy users were confused or caught off guard getting an invite on their phone, and wouldn’t join a friend’s group that they might otherwise have joined if contacted through a method that they were more comfortable with. SMS is still new to a lot of people in the USA, so we’re having to make it as comfortable as possible for them.
Secondly, and this is the more serious reason why we didn’t do an SMS invite feature, is the potential for abuse - an unscrupulous user could use it to blast out spam invites to random phone numbers. We could of course place limits and watchguards in place, but there’s always the worry that someone can sneak their way around it, and even the smallest bit of SMS spam is still SMS spam, which, at least in the USA, is all the more heinous for those who don’t have unlimited SMS plans.
It was a difficult decision to make, but we feel that at the current state of SMS, taking a more strict stance on fighting spam is the right choice. At some point when unlimited SMS plans are more ubiquitous, or when messages receivers are no longer charged, we’ll reevaluate, and of course we’ll be paying attention to users’ feedback and thoughts, but for now we’re going to keep the control in the users’ hands.
R3FRESH: Tatango is perfect for people that don’t use Twitter on their mobile phones, but still want to receive updates from their favorite sites. Did you mean for Tatango to be a notification service for websites and services?
PIKE: Initially we meant it just for connecting social groups, teams, clubs, but pretty quickly we realized that it can be a great marketing and social building tool as well as a communication platform.
A popular blog used one of our widgets, and had a huge percentage of it’s reader base sign up overnight to receive a text for breaking posts or news - it was one of the fastest growing groups we’d ever seen. I think the team’s done a great job of keeping the service very easy to use, but at the same time very versatile, so it can fit into a wide variety of possible uses.
A neat little feature we’ve got in the pipe is an RSS feed watcher, so a text will be automatically sent out when the linked RSS feed is updated.
R3FRESH: Finally, will Tatango be exclusive to text messages or will user be able to send pictures or other media?
PIKE: At the moment, we’re focusing on text messages only, but in the future we’re definitely looking into other media - pictures first, then eventually video.
One neat feature that we’re rolling out in the next month or so is group voice messaging - basically leaving a voice message for your whole group, for those situations when a text message is too short to fit what you want, or for when you want a more personalized touch.
From the Q&A it sounds like Tatango has a lot of new stuff on the way. I have set up a R3FRESH Tatango group where anyone can receive updates on their cell phone. Enter your cell phone number at the very bottom of the page to receive updates (or to just give Tatango a try). I also have 3 invites to Tatango, just leave a comment asking for a Tatango invite.
I wanted to thank Adrian Pike and Tatango for their time.
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