Gang,

Two years ago at Zeep Mobile we asked a ourselves a silly question, “Why is SMS so expensive and what can we do about it?”. As it turned out, the answer was more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Even so, none of us at Zeep were the kind of people to let government conspiracies, secret cabals and a mobile carrier or two (or all of them) get in our way.

That’s why we created Zeep Mobile, whose goal was to allow anyone with even a small amount of web programming know-how to interact with their consumers
through a mobile handset. Of course, we didn’t stop there. We went on to create Zeep Media, which enabled anyone with a credit card to advertise against the massive mobile audience our Zeep Mobile clients had provided us. In the midst of all of this, we made sure these advertisers could name their own price and paid only for results. No one ever accused us of lacking ambition.

But we knew pilfering the best ideas the internet had to offer and recreating them for the SMS world would not be enough. Unlike the relatively open gateways available to anyone on the Internet, the world of SMS is a high-walled, heavily-defended fortress. Throughout our search for a better solution, we’ve been constantly frustrated (and occasionally tormented) by the barriers keeping us from achieving scales to rival the Internet when it takes years to even convince a carrier to agree to a face-to-face meeting.

Though it often seemed an impossible task, I’m happy to tell you we’ve finally nailed it. I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that Zeep is joining the Vibes Media family. Vibes has spent the last 12 years fostering and nurturing great relationships with carries, publishers and marketers, establishing successful partnerships long before most of us even knew what a text message was.

You can expect many improvements over the coming months as we work to integrate our technologies with their platforms and customer service teams. Stay tuned, some fantastic announcements are on their way!

Scott Robertson
CEO and Cofounder
Zeep Mobile

We’re releasing a couple of updates to the site today and are going to shut down the site and API for up to a couple of hours, just in case things don’t go as planned.

So, what’s new?

Wait and see! We’ll announce everything right after it goes live.

What about messages?

Inbound messages from users will be queued and passed along once service is up again. Outbound messages won’t be sent.

Thanks for your patience!

We’re fixing a problem that prevented message delivery and expect things to be up and running again at 6PM PST. We’ll keep you posted.

Messages sent during this outage will be queued and re-sent once we’re back up again, but messages prior to this post are unfortunately gone.

Thanks for your patience!

Hey Zeep Developers! Our current version of the Zeep Mobile signup panel has been bugging me since we first released it. I’m making some improvements and wanted to let you know what’s coming and give you a chance to give feedback.

First, the current panel

And the updated version

So, what’s different?

Goodbye, country dropdown

The country dropdown in the current version is a disaster! For one, it gives users the false impression that our API works all over the world (we only support the US). Second, it makes the panel load so slowly it hurts. I ran a few tests the load times were regularily clocking in at over 10 seconds. It’s mostly because each of the flags in the dropdown is in individual image.

Some new styles

In the spirit of making the panel load faster, I’ve done away with most of the images that give the panel it’s current look. All of the rounded corners are now achieved via CSS with the border-radius property. Sure, it only works in the “good” browsers, but if your users are still riding the interwaves on the old IE, they don’t really care about how websites look now, do they?

New wording

I updated a lot of the copy to make things easier to understand. I replaced any instance of mobile with SMS. Hopefully the new wording will increase the number of signups for you guys!

A narrow version

In case you want to stick the panel in a sidebar or somewhere narrow, I made some tweaks to accomodate that. Adding a &width=narrow parameter to the iframe source URL will load an additional stylesheet that makes the panel display correctly when it’s in a narrow space. The screenshot there fits in a 200px space.

What do you guys think?

It’s still a work in progress, so let me know your thoughts and suggestions. We’re planning to push this change (among with various other improvements) early next week.

Happy Zeeping!

We’re upgrading some systems to increase performance and scalability and all Zeep Mobile services will be unavailable on Sunday, July 26th at midnight for about an hour.

Inbound messages from users will be stored in a queue and delivered when maintenance is finished. However, outbound messages during this time will not be delivered.

Thanks for your patience!

Hi Gang, it’s high time for an update! It’s been since December that you last heard from us and that just won’t stand! Things are moving along here in Zeep land. As usual, we’ve been spending most of our time working on Zeep Media, our ad network.

Zeep Media the service that advertisers use to place ads in messages generated by the API. We’ve also partnered with some other SMS publishers to get access to more volume. We’re ironing out some bugs, fixing stuff up, and you’ll hear from us when it’s nice and ready. We’ll have a special offer for our developers to try it out.

Check out Zeep Media

Now, some fun Zeep Mobile stats

We keep some rough monthly stats about Zeep Mobile and thought you guys might be interested in how things are moving along. In a nutshell, we’re growing steadily.

Message volume
This is a combined incoming and outgoing message volume by month. We had some hiccups in February that put a slight kink in the graph, but overall we’re seeing steady and predictable growth.

Unique subscribers
This shows the number of unique subscribers that have registered to receive alerts from services powered by Zeep Mobile.

Let me know if there are other kinds of stats you’re curious about.

Ad-free messages

We’ve also rolled out a pricing plan in for developers interested in ad-free messages. Some organizations simply cannot have ads placed in their messages, and we wanted to accommodate a wide range of use cases.

Ad-free pricing

If you’re interested in ad-free messages, drop us a line. We’ll have to set you up manually for the time being.

Happy Zeeping!

We seem to be experiencing some issues either internally or with our service provider. We’re working to resolve the issue and hope to get messages flowing again shortly.

Update: Tue Dec  2 23:39:46 PST 2008

Messages are flowing, and things are again operational. You might notice some problems with long messages that also contain characters that require two bytes to encode using 7-bit GSM.

http://www.developershome.com/sms/gsmAlphabet.asp

Don’t know what this means? Basically any of these characters might cause unwanted behavior.

^ { } \ [ ~ ] | €

We’ll try to have this fixed tomorrow.

We’ll be doing some maintenance work on our servers and will have to shut down message delivery for about three hours starting at 9PM on Sunday, November 20, 2008. During this update, we’ll be:

• Performing some back-end improvements
• Switching to new servers
• Implementing Ad Teaser delivery

The only difference once we’re back up again is that you might start seeing some Ad Teasers being placed in SMS messages sent by your apps.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

shizzow is a brand new location-based social web service that is using our Zeep Mobile API to power their SMS features. Shizzow lets you Shout from any location to let your friends know where you are, making it easier to meet up in person.

I took it for a spin to check out the service, see how they implemented the Zeep Mobile API and to write up this little case study for developers who are curious what other websites are up to with Zeep. Shizzow futher ado…

shizzow’s SMS features

With shizzow, you can send and receive Shouts with any mobile device via SMS. To do this, you first need to subscribe your mobile device via the Zeep Mobile panel that they’ve embedded in the Preferences / Contact Information section. Once you’ve subscribed, you can start shouting from anywhere! You can also have shizzow send your friends’ shouts to your device.

Shout, shout, shout it out loud

All Shouts originate from a location, so before you can Shout via SMS you need to add at least one location to your favourite location list and give it a (preferrably) short nickname. I’m at the ActiveState office in Vancouver right now and added that as a location with the nickname AS. Your Shouts show up on your profile page on Shizzow and are also sent to friends who have subscribed to your Shouts.

To Shout, I sent this message:

shzow #s AS to 88147

• 88147 is the Zeep Mobile shortcode.
• shzow is the Shizzow SMS prefix (required because multiple websites use Zeep Mobile for their SMS features).
• #s is how you tell Shizzow you’re Shouting.
• AS is the nickname I assigned to the ActiveState office.

You can also add a message to your shout with the #m command following a shout like so…

shzow #s AS #m Working for the man! to 88147

As you can see, it’s pretty damn easy. Here’s a complete list of Shizzow’s SMS commands. It would have been nice to receive a confirmation message after a successful Shout, as I had to check the website to make sure it made it on there (It did, and really quickly, because Zeep and shizzow rule).

Go give it a try!

I really like Shizzow’s concept and execution. Being a social service, it will thrive as the user base grows so… GO TRY IT! You can request an invite from their site, or if you leave a comment here I have three to give away.

shizzow.com

It took many months and finally T-Mobile approved our shortcode. You’ll be able to send and receive SMS from T-Mobile handsets now. Some of you have said that this was possible already, but at least now it’s “official”.