The Two Worst Things About Poll Everywhere

(December 2008 Update: Both of these inconveniences are not issues any more.)

  1. To participate in a poll, your audience has to text the word CAST followed by a space and a randomly assigned number. This can be unintuitive for first time texters.
  2. Our text message replies are currently built on a wonderful service called TextMarks which supports its business by tagging SMS replies with a short text ad. We’d prefer to be ad-free because it encourages your audience trust the overall service to be spam-free.

In a couple short weeks, we’ll finally remedy both annoyances because we’ll have our own SMS short code. We’re also going to let premium subscription customers choose their own keywords (there will be no per-keyword fee). Free users will still have numeric keywords automatically assigned, but without the CAST prefix.

Some savvy observers may be thinking, “What about keyword land grab?” Not to worry, we have a good solution to follow soon.

The process of obtaining a short code is neither pleasant nor rational. You have to pay for the non-functional short code for months while the mobile carriers hobble through their approval and provisioning process. We calm ourselves by imagining an artisan from the 1800s working a huge pile of new short code applications, but taking the time to lovingly craft each short code with care. Our baby has been three months in the making.

We want to acknowledge that Ariel at TextMarks has been wonderful to work with. If it wasn’t for TextMarks, we would never have gotten off the ground. We enthusiastically recommend their service to any website looking to add SMS functionality with a minimum of BS and pain.