No sooner had I posted my previous piece on collaboration tools, than Ken Thompson, of Bioteams fame, emails me to say that Swarmteams is now fully public, providing a service that joins up mobile phone texting and the rest of the online tools like instant messaging, email and RSS. Ken is based in Northern Ireland, and I've has a couple of charming phone conversations that convinced me Ken is indeed a very human (or bio-) networker. The man does his own marketing, personally. Fuller flavour here from Nancy White's meeting with Ken.
The technology behind the system is a little complex (if usable when in your hand) so I'm grateful that Robin Good offers a full review here. As Robin explains the swarm communication service:
... is available in two basic versions. Swarm-it! for individuals or personal use and Swarm-Pro for companies and organizations, provides an effective web-based interface, accessible from any browser or computer type, that makes it extremely easy to set-up groups of contacts that you want to be messaging to. Once that is done, you, or anyone else elected in the swarm can broadcast messages to anyone of your selected "swarms" (a group of people you have signed up) and even receive replies if you decide so.
The new services bring flexible, multi-channel mobile group messaging to anyone with a mobile phone or web connection no matter where they are. The service in fact works globally across continents and different mobile operators. Swarm-it! and SwarmPro also support direct communication to instant messaging platforms such as ICQ, Skype and MSN Messenger.
Swarm-it! is free to sign-up for with a bonus of 50 free messages ready to be used. After those are exhausted Swarm-it! costs $9.95 for 100 SMS.
I need to round up a few more SMS-friendly collaborators to try the service fully, but what interests me is that the system comes from someone driven by a deep understanding of what makes teams and groups work together (or not), and so has some chance of building the other big bridge that we need - between those most comfortable with tech tools, and those who won't go much beyond phone and face-to-face.
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