SMS 411

Good news for people who use Skype: You can send SMS text messages to your friends’ mobile phones from within Skype. You need to have Skype 2.5 for this to work. For Mac users with the beta (pre-production) version of Skype 2.5, you can also receive text messages in Skype, so your friends can reply to you.

To send a text message from Skype, go to the Tools menu and select Send SMS Message. You’ll be prompted to select the recipients from your address book, but you can only pick from those who have entered their mobile phone numbers in their Skype profiles, or for whom you’ve entered mobile numbers in your address book. Or, you can enter the mobile number of the recipient manually if he or she isn’t already listed.

You can specify whether you want the text message to list your Skype ID or your mobile number as the sender of the message. If you want to be able to receive replies, you will need to have an SMS-enabled mobile phone.

This is a convenient way to send a message to several people at once, since Skype lets you enter multiple recipients.

Note that you will need SkypeOut credit to send SMS messages. Skype charges a tiny bit less than 13 cents per text message ($0.129 to be exact).

More info on Skype 2.5 for Mac: Skype adds SMS to new Mac beta

Download Skype 2.5 beta for Mac

Download Skype 2.5 for Windows

Think you can text pretty fast? Try typing this 160-character sentence: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.” A 16-year-old Singaporean student, Ang Chuang Yang, did it in 41.52 seconds, using a standard phone keypad. That’s a new world record, beating the previous record of 42.22 seconds set earlier this year. Clearly, having nimble fingers helps, as does lots of practice — but Ang also recommends using a phone with large keys on its dial pad.

SMS speed champ says use big keys | NEWS.com.au

SMS text messaging is useful for a lot of things: Sending notes to your friends when you’re in a meeting or some other place you can’t talk; letting people know where you are without interrupting whatever they’re doing; passing love notes; getting information from Google SMS or 4INFO. But there’s one thing you should never send via SMS: a Dear John letter.

Text messaging is way too impersonal (not to mention brief) to use it for breaking up with someone. Not that it stops some people from doing just that. In fact, it appears that Britney Spears just broke up with her husband (and father of her children) Kevin Federline via SMS. Now that’s cold.

This video catches the moment on film where KFed gets the bad news via SMS (it’s about 1:30 into the video).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GliNjOzP1M]

Do you live or work in San Francisco, or know someone who does? AlertSF is a free service that will send text messages to your phone, BlackBerry, or pager whenever an earthquake occurs in the city. The alerts may also include potentially critical information about where to get help or emergency services after a disaster. The system is also set up to deal with a tsunami hitting San Francisco.

To sign up, go to http://alertsf.org and sign up for a new account. You’ll need to enter an email address (that will become your login) and password, then tell the system what kind of phone or pager you have and what it’s number is. Once you’ve created an account, it will send a confirmation text message to your phone. You can also pick one or more areas of the city or specific addresses that you’re interested in, so you can keep tabs on your home, office, and child’s school, for instance.

Important note: Systems like this can only work if your carrier’s cellular network is still available after a disaster. If a tsunami strikes your city and knocks down all the cell towers in a particular region, your cell phone will not work at all, for voice or for text messages. It’s also important to remember that you may not be able to recharge a cell phone if the power is out. However, if your phone is working and the cellular network is available, text messaging can be an extremely effective way of communicating during an emergency, and services like AlertSF can really help.

High school students in Chula Vista, California recently got a surprise visit from hiphop mogul Diddy. How? Students at the school sent more text messages than any other San Diego area school during a local radio station contest.

During the four-day contest, Chula Vista students sent 34,000 SMS messages to the radio station, with some students sending hundreds of messages singlehandedly.

According to the news report, 40% of Americans with cell phones have tried SMS texting — and it’s definitely catching the eye of marketers interested in snaring our attention.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to find SMS “short codes” embedded in ads, CDs, or other products. Send a message to this special short code and you can get access to special ringtones or information — or you can get a chance to win a prize.

Exciting new marketing trend? Or yet another high-tech way to distract students from their schoolwork? Let me know what you think.

Last week, the antivirus software company McAfee announced that they’d seen several examples of malicious software targeting people via SMS. McAfee dubbed these “SMiShing attacks,” for “SMS phishing.” (Phishing is a kind of fraud where people send bogus email messages, purportedly from some official source like your credit card company or a government, to try to trick you into giving up your personal information or clicking on a dangerous URL.)

The way these attacks worked is that people would receive an SMS message saying something like “You’ve just been subscribed to a dating service!” or “This is your cell phone company. Click here to download our cell phone antivirus software.” Then, if people responded to that SMS message — either by replying to the SMS or by following the URL embedded in it — something bad would happen. In one case people were charged $2 when they tried to unsubscribe from a bogus dating service. In another case, clicking on the link loaded “Trojan Horse” software onto your phone, disabling it.

Does this mean that you need to start worrying about SMS viruses? Not really. Both attacks were fairly small, and they were limited to European cell phone users. Also, the victims had to have a particular cell phone model for the attacks to work. All in all, these were pretty weak security attacks.

Still, the attacks underscore an important lesson: Don’t act on anything in an SMS text message unless you know, and trust, the sender. Even if you get a message that says it’s from your cellular carrier, don’t click on any links in the message or reply to it. Instead, dial your carrier’s usual customer service phone number — or visit your carrier’s web site — to investigate the offer before doing anything about it.

AMBER Alerts go out whenever the police have information about child abductions. In many cases, these alerts — which are usually displayed on TV broadcasts, freeway information signs, and other public places — have resulted in timely tips that have helped law enforcement recover the kidnapped child.

Now you can get AMBER Alerts on your cell phone, too. The wireless industry association, CTIA, teamed up with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the U.S. Department of Justice to deliver geographically-targeted AMBER alerts via SMS. That means whenever an AMBER Alert goes out in your area, you’ll get an SMS text message telling you what to look for (the make and model of the kidnapper’s car, or a license plate number, for instance).

To found out more, see the CTIA Wireless Foundation page on Wireless AMBER Alerts, or go directly to the sign up page for wireless AMBER Alerts.

eBay recently launched a service that lets you get SMS notifications on auctions you’re bidding on. If you’ve ever lost a bidding war because you forgot to sign on to eBay just before an auction ended, you’ll appreciate this service. Whenever you’re outbid, eBay will send you a short text message — and you can raise your bid just by replying to that message, right on your phone.

To set up SMS alerts on eBay, go to “My eBay” and then click on “Preferences” (the link is underneath “My Account” in the left-hand sidebar). Then click on “Notification Preferences.”

You’ll see a link to add a mobile phone number for SMS text message alerts. Click on it, and you’ll get a screen where you enter your cellular service provider (aka carrier) and phone number. Currently, eBay supports Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, Nextel, Verizon, and Alltel. If you’re concerned about security, you can also specify a short PIN that you have to enter in order to confirm bids that you send from your phone. You can also limit the hours that eBay will send messages to you (so you don’t get woken up at 1am by the beep your phone makes when it receives an SMS), and tell it how many minutes before an auction ends that you want to receive a reminder.

Once you’ve verified your phone number (by replying to a confirmation SMS), eBay will give you an SMS notification option any time you’re bidding on an item. You’ll also be able to place items on your watchlist (without bidding on them) and receive regular updates via SMS.

eBay charges $0.25 for every 10 messages sent, and the charges will appear on your cell phone bill.

If you want to turn off eBay SMS notifications, just reply to an eBay text message with the word STOP.

What if you need to send a message to someone and you can’t just talk to them on the phone — perhaps because you’re in the library or in class? And what if they don’t have an SMS-capable cell phone?

If you’ve got a Sprint phone, no worries — you can use the “Text to Landline” service to send text messages to people, even if they don’t have SMS text messaging.

All you need to do is compose a text message in the normal way, and enter the 10-digit phone number of the person you want to send it to. After you send it off, Sprint will turn your text message into a voice message, using text-to-speech technology. Your computerized voice message will play whenever the person on the other end picks up their phone.

Sprint even offers the option for the recipient to reply (via voice) and their response will be sent to you as a voice message.

Pretty slick, huh? And it costs exactly the same amount as it does to send an ordinary text message. (check Sprint SMS pricing info)

For more details, check out the Text to Landline FAQ for Sprint subscribers. If you’re on Nextel, read the FAQ on Text to Landline for Nextel customers.

When it comes to getting free information via SMS, there’s definitely more than one game in town. 4INFO offers a wide range of free information services, all of which are accessible by SMS text messaging.

The basic gist of 4INFO is this: You send an information request to the short code 4INFO (44636). In a few seconds to a minute, you’ll get an SMS message in return containing the information you were looking for.

For example, say you wanted to know the latest scores for the Yankees. All your SMS message needs to contain is one word: yankees. Send it off to 44636, then wait a moment. 4info will reply with an SMS containing the latest game score and the date and time of the next game.

For stock prices, just send a ticker symbol as your message: aapl or ibm. 4info will respond with a message containing the current price, the day’s high and low, and the stock market volume.

4info can also do FedEx package tracking, give you the weather forecast by ZIP code, tell you where to find a Wi-Fi hotspot in your ZIP code, give you your horoscope, and even tell you how to mix drinks. It’s an amazingly versatile information service, and all of it is completely free. (You will incur charges from your cellular carrier for using SMS, however.)

4info also offers SMS text alerts, so you can get messages automatically every day that tell you what weather to expect, when that package you sent actually gets delivered, what your horoscope for that day is, and the like. You can even get inning-by-inning or quarter-by-quarter updates on pro sports games. To get alerts, you’ll need to register on the 4info web site first (it’s free).

For more information on the kinds of searches 4info supports, along with examples of each one, check out the 4INFO how-to page.