I’ve never heard of TeleFlip until about a week ago when someone sent me an email telling me to check them out. I’m going to give them a try with my Mobile Marketing Watch email.
What’s cool about TeleFlip is that it’s actually better than real email because it utilizes a trust network. So if you’re not in my trust network then you can’t spam me because I control who goes into the trusted list. Users upload their contact lists and those lists effectively become your white list. Officer trusty isn’t going to let an email get sent to the SMS gateway if it’s not in your white list otherwise he’s gonna get fired.
In the last couple of days there has been a tremendous amount of blog chatter regarding trusted networks. One A List Blogger even predicted that these types of trusted fabrics are better and that over time users will move away from applications like Google as an example and gravitate towards applications that rely on trust. I think he’s on to something even though he’s getting skewered.
Now, speaking of trust. You’ll need to trust TeleFlip because one of the first things they ask for in the sign-up process is your email account credentials. I definitely see some people bailing on this service at this point. To be perfectly honest, I hesitated too and so I’m not going to test this service with my GMail Account but I am going to try it out using one of my Mobile Marketing Watch email accounts.
Here’s something that it’s missing and I think it’s critical but I’ve been told by someone very close to the Company that they’re working on it. TeleFlip right now does not offer integration with things like LinkedIn or GMail to load contacts. I think this is going to be mandatory to get adoption. Who wants to spend time typing this stuff in repeatedly?
I’m still going to give TeleFlip a whirl though.