Google SMS Channels – Create free SMS-based communities

Google SMS Channels is a new product out from the Google India Labs available to only Indians.  It lets you create SMS-based communities for free.  SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to. You can also create groups over SMS to communicate with your friends, family, and co-workers.

It is a free service and you can create closed communities to enable messaging between only family members or a group of employees.  You can publish your Blogspot blog posts, Google Groups messages, or any RSS/Atom enabled site posts to the channel and allow the visitors to subscribe to it to receive the new posts via SMS.  You can also create a channel just for you to receive the Google News over SMS related to a keyword provided by you.

I see endless ideas with this feature.  For examples, creating a closed invitation only channel for employees for communicating important messages.  Creating channel with only family members to share birthday reminders and wishes, festival wishes, etc.  What you say?

Website/blog owners can now offer SMS alerts via this channels. Whenever you post new content, alert will be sent through SMS to the subscribers.

There are already lot of channels pouring in.  Subscribe to one of them to see how it works.  You may be interested in subscribing to joke channels.

Read the help pages to better understand the options. Give it a try and explore what you can do with Google SMS Channels.