Create your SMS service with TextMarks

Since I released Text WifiPDX, I’ve been playing around with the TextMarks service. Anyone can create an two-way text messaging system with very little additional effort.

There are three ways to use TextMarks:

1. Have a stock message reply to a text, like an email auto-responder
2. Send a message to a webpage and respond with the contents of the page (that’s what I did with Text WifiPDX).
3. Subscribe to updates, which send periodic messages, like a short (very short) e-newsletter to your phone

Then choose a keyword:

All three letter combinations and a few popular words are reserved, but there’s still a lot of good stuff.

If you already have a web site that interacts with data somehow, adding a TextMark is pretty easy. My tool to find WiFi in Portland has been around since 2004. The hardest park about hooking up the code to my TextMark was finding out how to pass the non-keyword portion of the text to a web page.

For Expert Users: you can include up to 9 variables in TextMarks that get their information from a URL. Include \1, \2, … \9 in the URL and these variables will be replaced by the words that follow the TextMark in the request, or use \0 to get all words following the TextMark.

Do you have information that will help people when they’re out and about? Or, do you want to make direct contact with prospects who view your ad? Check out TextMarks.