Filed under: iPhone, App Review
FunMail adds instant images to Facebook status & MMS
At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop.
I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep).
That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night.
Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.
Despite 'fun' being right there in the name of the app, I brought this up to Lavine: isn't the point of a short message service to convey information quickly and in a reasonably utilitarian fashion? Enter the research: depending on who you talk to, mobile users in the 16-25 age group send scores, sometimes hundreds of text messages a day; it's a primary communications mechanism. He suggested that the lack of forceful US adoption of MMS isn't necessarily about people not wanting to send images, but rather that it takes too long and requires too much effort to take pictures and attach them to texts. A more frictionless system like FunMail gives texting users 'something extra' to help set their personal messaging apart and make it a little more interesting to the person at the other end of the exchange.
While you can't send tweets from the iPhone app yet (a 1.0 limitation that's likely to change; meanwhile you can generate Funmailable tweets via the web app), I can easily see the FunMail pictures becoming a source of glee and/or deep irritation for many Twitter users. Images in email or on a Facebook wall don't require any extra effort to see, but clicking on an image link in a tweet only to discover (for the umpteenth time) that it's not actually a picture of something interesting but merely a posterized and FunMail'ed version of the message text... well, it's a good thing that the company will be moving from bit.ly to a custom domain name for URL shortening, which will enable us to recognize the URLs on sight. An open API for FunMail's back end will enable other service developers to leverage the image matching tech, and apps for most other major mobile OSes are on the way soon. The next version of the app will also allow users to add their own pictures straight from the iPhone's camera roll.
I truly can't decide whether I think FunMail is a good thing or a bad thing. The free version of the app will eventually incorporate ads, which could take the form of product-centric image choices based on their relevance to your message text ("Let's grab a beer" alongside an icy Red Stripe bottle?). If I were a brand manager, I'd be swooning at the opportunity to get my messaging slipstreamed into the personal communications between my hard-to-reach potential customers, and wide-eyed at the possibilities for metrics and campaign testing as users tell me click-by-click which of my logos and approaches is the stickiest. As a sender or receiver of said messages, I'm not so certain that's what I want.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
bryanhill said 11:01AM on 11-20-2009
This sounded like a really great concept, but when you send a text to someone they just get a link to click on and it takes you to a website with the image. Not what i had expected. I even tried sending one to myself to see if maybe the other person had to have the app installed, same result. Oh well - maybe next time
Reply
starq said 11:18AM on 11-20-2009
Agreed. It sucks. Deleted.
starq said 11:28AM on 11-20-2009
Or - you could use the Funmail App to create the image, do a screen capture, open Photoshop Mobile, crop the image, save it to your camera roll, Open Messages App, insert saved image, send MMS, delete the images from your camera roll and ...
No, I was right the first time. It sucks. Deleted.
bryanhill said 11:35AM on 11-20-2009
you can send it to yourself and then when you go to the website link just hold your finger on the pic to copy it and then paste it into the official apple mms app, but that is still waaay to many steps to make it practical
abusyphone said 6:10PM on 11-20-2009
you have the mobile app, not the iPhone app right? Try the iPhone app or try it on Facebook, much better experience until it gets adopted into the messaging stack.
Allen said 12:10PM on 11-20-2009
Yeah, same here. Nothing but a link for my recipients. FAIL.
Reply
Pete said 11:09AM on 11-26-2009
I'm pretty impressed. The facebook integration's really smooth and overall the app feels just like the iPhone messaging client, which makes it really easy to jump right in and use.
The link is a little surprising if you're used to normal MMS, but I like the fact that they added a simple WAP version of the service behind the link to allow non-iPhone folks to try out FunMail by replying in kind.
Reply
abusyphone said 6:15PM on 11-20-2009
All of you..are thinking too much. I think it's because the article did not state how to freakin' use it. super easy! Go on Facebook (to the app) and within seconds you're Done. On the iPhone app, a few seconds, it's sent/done. You type a message into a box then it auto generates five to choose from, pick one CLICK SEND. That freakin' easy. My mom can do it.
Don't like the five served up? Click the create button and five new ones come up..all day long.
IT'S SO EASY THAT A MONKEY CAN DO IT. :)
Reply
bryanhill said 7:43PM on 11-20-2009
I am using the iPhone app....and while your mother and a monkey may be able to do it, the recipient is still going to get a text message that just has a link to funmail's website to see the picture you created. They do not receive the picture as an MMS message.