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As I sent my wife a text who is at home with our baby, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. A message total that was decreasing on the total amount every text I made. After further review, I found that Google is now making the SMS quota visible to the user to try and throttle the use of this majestic tool.
This is a strange new “visible” addition to the SMS interface that I have grown to love. Especially, when http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=140366″ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>#4 of the Gmail Help documentation states very clearly that, “Messages sent or received to/from phones in North America don’t have a quota.” There is a slight possbility the Gmail Help is out of date OR Google has made a new policy change and shifted to help throttle back SMS carrier bandwidth. Do you have any ideas why this would be necessary?
Upon further review of this SMS throttle mechanism, I found that you are given 50 SMS texts from the Gmail interface (unless in North America). One text takes away from this total and once you reach “0” you must wait 24 hours until you are renewed back to 50. If and only if your text is replied to decides on whether or not you can continue to SMS with this person. When they reply, your quota increases by 5. Of course, you can only have a maximum of 50 texts in the quota at one time.
They also mention how to cheat the system of course, “you can always send an SMS to your own phone, and then reply to that message multiple times.” So, what’s the big deal anyway? Hmmmm…
There is the slight possibility that I missed this in the beginning as well, but I don’t think so. I believe this used to have a “character counter” for alerting the user how much they have left; much like the twitter tools we use everyday.
Seems so long ago that 140 character communication was useful, now I text from computers and tweet from my phone.
