Dear Fellow Nerds,

As you may have noticed (spelled out in all those words in the post before this one), we were acquired by Vibes Media and have been up to some pretty cool stuff there. In our pursuit of all things fantastic, we’ve uncovered a few missing pieces to the puzzle. One of those pieces is a Super Talented Web Hacker. If you think you’ve got the chops and don’t mind moving to Chicago (which is quite lovely, especially this time of year), check out the full posting by clicking here http://www.vibes.com/contact/careers?nl=1&jvi=oapjVfwx,Job.

Here’s a brief peek at the job and Vibes to whet your appetite.

VIBES MEDIA is looking for a SUPER TALENTED WEB HACKER who sweats dynamic languages and has JavaScript dripping out of their ears. Our demands require a hacker with a history of building awesome applications people love to use.

At Vibes Media, we send a lot of text messages, over 500 million and counting. We’re a leading provider of interactive mobile marketing solutions and recognized as a pioneer in the mobile industry. We have partnered with some of the world’s leading consumer brands, publishers, sports teams and musicians. The likes of Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T, Coca Cola, Tribune, CBS, Disney, Intel, MTV and many more. We’re still a rapidly growing company with plenty of innovations and big moves on the horizon.

We know you’re out there somewhere, super talented web hacker. Don’t keep us waiting.

Simon Wex
CTO and Co-founder
Zeep Mobile

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

Previously, a user would have to contact us with their phone number and we’d reset their panel so they could try again.

We’ve changed the panel so that it automatically resets after 15 minutes of being in the “Oops!” state. Now users will be able to try re-subscribing without our intervention.

I’ll be updating the panel copy shortly and also fixing that glaring typo! Can you find it?

Check out the Ad-free Plans.

Ad-supported messages will remain free and will contain a short advertisement.

How does it work

Once you sign up, you’ll need to add ad_free=”true” to each message that you’d like to send without an ad.

Check out the updated docs for more info.

Questions?

For more information, check out the ad-free FAQ.

Happy developing!

Check out the Code Samples page.

Thanks to everyone who contributed! If you have any samples you’d like to share, let us know.

The new panel

So, what’s different?

1. Goodbye, country dropdown

We got rid of the country dropdown since we only support the US. This makes the panel easier to use and has the added benefit of making it load a lot faster.

2. A narrow version

In case you want to stick the panel in a sidebar or somewhere narrow, I made some tweaks to accommodate 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.

You’ll have to tweak the height and width of the iframe depending on the exact space.

Happy Zeeping!

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!

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!

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!

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!