MyToday: India’s No.1 SMS Service – A Review

Written by Pavan Kumar on September 1, 2008

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MyToday is a great free sms service supporting almost all carriers in India. They have a very huge user database with about 10k members joining their service everyday. They offer different sms services like news, cricket, health, quotes, word,…

sms services

MyToday supports sms group feature called MOBs. These MOBs will have an administrator who will take up all administrative activities like adding new members, giving publisher rights, approving members,… In the web interface of MyToday, you can find all the published messages and all the members of the MOB. They even give you chance to make your MOB as public or private.

Another great feature from MyToday was feed updates. Yes! You could get updates on mobile as sms when your favorite site publishes an article. The top popular article on techpavan.com about getting orkut scraps on mobile was using that feature of MyToday which no more works.

Though I am using it for quite long time, in my view MyToday MOB feature is a crap. Here are the reasons why I consider that:

  1. Privacy is not assured: MyToday does not sell your phone numbers to anyone, but your phone numbers can easily be accessed by the MOB admin.
  2. Not Instant Messaging: MyToday used to offer a very great service with MOBs initially, and they stopped the service for an upgrade. After that up(?)grade, this feature has lot of flaws. The message sent to the group will be published sometime in the night when they have less sms traffic or that may not be published at all, but still you can access them on their web interface.
  3. Inconvenient format: If you want to form a MOB, you need to select a keyword for your mob which is at least 5 characters long. And to publish a message onto the mob, you need to send an sms like PUB KEYWORD YOUR-MSG which becomes an inconvenient part for regular sms purposes.
  4. Crappy web interface: MyToday website is one of the high traffic websites in India and alexa ranks it 2700 in India. But this is only website I have seen with such a good traffic but a poor user interface. When you join any MOB of MyToday, you will only be able to stop receiving sms from that, but cannot be able to delete that from your profile. Same case with RSS feeds added to MyToday which they have stopped serving now. They have stopped serving this feature now, but the web interface still accepts adding different feeds.
  5. No modification in MOB category: As I told, a MOB may be public or private. But, you can only decide that during the creation of MOB. Once a MOB is created as private, you cannot make it public at any time.

Though this MyToday has few minus points, I still recommend that because no other service in India can beat them. These days Vakow is making its way, but features and service they provide is entirely different than MyToday.
 

       

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8 Readers responded to this post

going to register with them and see how they are

@ Madhur

They do a great work….. keeping updated millions of customers is a really good job….

Hi!

I’m a developer working on MyToday. Thanks for your feedback… let me address some of them..
1. Privacy – The phone number can seen by the MOB admin only if you have chosen to moderate subscription to it. So, the admin of a private MOB knows the phone numbers of the people s/he has invited, or accepted after moderation. Admins of public groups cannot see phone numbers.
2. Delays in delivery – We have to apologize here. There have been some capacity issues which have led to poor quality service over the last two months. But, this should improve very soon. Thanks for your patience!
3. Format of message – Just using MOBNAME works for now. There are no plans to disable it any time soon, but we may at some point in the future.
4. Bad interface – Actually, the MOB management interface is intended for GPRS users only. It’s not meant to be accessed in a web browser where it definitely does not look good. We need to put out a proper web interface soon….
5. Change in MOB type – You should be able to change from private to public and back by going to the “Manage MOBS” link as soon as you log in to http://pub.mytoday.com

@ Thejo

Glad to see your comment here. Actually, I have mailed the contact id tens of times and could receive a reply only once. Even that did not meet my expectations.

Comming to the points discussed.

1. Privacy: I maintain two MOBs – one is of my engg friends and other is of my 12th friends. The first is of private and the other public. I can view members of both MOBs. You have clearly informed in your 5th point that private and public can be switched easily. Won’t it be possible that you create a MOB in public, gain lots members and convert into private and get numbers of all subscribers.

2. Delay: We will wait as till today, none have been able to beat MyToday. If someone start a killer startup which serves better than MyToday, it will take no time for users to switch that. I have listed few of your competitors here. Just have a look. Sooner the better for improvement.

3. Format: I tested, it works. Thanks for the great improvement. Thanks and congrats for that.

4. Interface: If you have an ultimate instant sms service, interface is not of much consideration, as Indians are not much familiar with internet as they are with mobile. But good interface is still a must. Take time, but design THE BEST.

5. Change of MOB type: Again it is not working for me. Our 1st community was created some 3-4 months back and it could not be changed. But the 2nd one created some 2 weeks back accepts change in type. Could you please explain what is that Category indicate in mob editing page. I could not notice any difference when I used Alumni or Friends. Could you please be more clear about that.

—–

I feel very happy to receive comments from the founders/tech-team of great services. I already had such credit when I reviewed toktumi, vakow, icall. Hope you reply to my qureies in this comment.

Hi Pavan,

1. If you can see the subscribers of public feeds, then it is a bug that must be fixed. As for converting of feeds to view numbers, yes, it is a loophole. We will look into how it can be avoided.
5. In case changing MOB type is not working for you, please send the details of the MOB to amit.kumar@netcore.co.in and we will look into it.

Feel free to mail Amit if you find any bugs in using MOBs or Chat.

Thanks for your feedback.

@ Thejo

Thanks a lot for giving the contact id of a right person. I needed that very badly since a quite long time.

Thank you very much. I will surely contact Amit.

hello

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About The Author

    Pavan Kumar

    Pavan Kumar completed Engineering in Electronics and Communication in the year 2008. He is very enthusiastic and keen to work on different aspects of computer, internet and mobile related fields. The articles here reflect his creativity. This blog was started as a showcase of solutions for different problems and today it has got a good reputation in the blogosphere. Read More...

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