Call me old fashioned, but I’m more of an Overheard guy than a TextsFromLastNight fan. What I like about the Overheard phenomenon is that the bar for contribution is pretty low… I type two letters and I’m participating.
That’s why I haven’t really used Bnter so much. I added one convo (a Twitter conversation, actually), but I just really don’t care that much about about sharing funny things to retype them from scratch into a website. Some people are following me, but not a lot, and it doesn’t seem like it’s really gone viral yet—probably because of that high bar for contribution.
Might I suggest a pivot/product roadmap adjustment?
A lot of people don’t realize this, but you can replace the native messaging client on Android phones with another app for gathering and publishing text messages. I use Handcent, but there are a number of options. You install the app, then shut off and turn notifications off on the native client, and voila, you’re using a different app for text messages. Why isn’t there a Bnter Android app with one-click conversation share?
Given the growth of Android devices, if I were Bnter, I’d focus 100% of my efforts on the Android platform right now, creating a social text messaging client—one that allows me to favorite, republish, and consume texts from my network. People seem to like posting entertaining texts and seeing ones from their network, so why not build an app that allows that to happen. You’ll probably never get an API into the iPhone messaging client, but the Google platform is ripe for this. Throw in Google voice and anyone who uses that as their phone number, and you can collect even more messages than just one ones on Android.
The Android demographics are ripe for this as well. It’s much more diversified and mainstream b/c of how it’s sold and marketed—more carriers, cheaper plans. There are lots of teens who can’t afford iPhone dataplans, but will be jumping all over Virgin’s $25/month Android phone with unlimited texting.