Post Published on June 2, 2011.
Last Updated on April 24, 2016 by davemackey.
[Update: The application has undergone several naming revisions, it is currently MightyText.]
I’ve never been a huge fan of text messaging. Maybe my fingers are too big or maybe I can type too fast on a computer keyboard – but text messaging has always been frustrating to me when it involves any sort of sustained or substantive conversation. In spite of its primitive nature in many ways it has been and continues to be a major means of communication and its influence seems to be expanding rather than contracting. Thankfully, Texty has come along as one of a number of innovative startups that are stretching what SMS is and does…and I was lucky enough to get in on the Texty closed beta and have been using Texty for perhaps 1-2 weeks.
What is Texty? I’m glad you asked. It consists of two components. One is an application that runs on your Android phone, the other is an extension that runs on your computer in the Google Chrome browser. These two components communicate with one another – transferring text messages sent to your phone to the computer and transferring messages from the computer back to your phone.
Now my wife (who is a SMS fiend!) can text me to her heart’s content and I can reply back in a timely fashion without ever touching my phone! Sure, you could do this before but usually this involved using a different number for text messages sent from the computer than your actual phone number – and this became confusing.
Texty is a great step forward and I won’t be surprised if Google snaps them up (just for intellectual property rights). What Texty is doing is something that should have been a standard feature long ago.
That said, Texty isn’t the perfect application. A few features I’d love to see that would take the application to the next level are:
- Provide me with a way to backup/store my SMS messages – both from Texty and the phone – to my computer or the cloud. I don’t like having tons of text threads open or to have all the previous days and weeks conversations showing when I’m texting someone – but I do like to have these in the archives (so to speak) for future reference.
- Right now if you read a message on your computer via Texty and then look at your phone it looks as if you have unread text messages. Texty needs to mark the messages that are read on the computer as read on the phone as well. The easiest way to do this is if I send a reply after receiving a text message in Texty, then obviously I’ve read the message that was sent previously. I’m sure some folks will disagree – so perhaps this could be an optional configuration.
Have you used Texty? What do you love/hate about Texty? What about SMS in general?