BluePulse Mobile Messaging And Status On The Move

06.10.08 | No Comments | by: Dave Jeyes

BluePulse CEO and Founder, Ben Keighran, and I had a chance to catch up while he was in town for the GSP East conference. Bluepulse is a mobile messaging service that allows you to connect with friends from all your email service providers and share your status with them on the go. Ben’s goal is to make it easy to stay in touch with friends in real time on the mobile web.

Ben’s entrepreneurial urge began when he developed a mobile widget platform for Java-based phones and noticed that people were using his widgets to stay in touch on their phones. He sees the mobile web as the ideal way to allow users with any cell phone to communicate with one another.

Bluepulse has grown immensely popular since he launched globally in December 2006. Their users send over 200 million messages per month in 198 countries from their mobile phones. This starts to get interesting when compared with Twitter, which was host to 3 million messages per day as of March which translates to approximately 90 million messages per month. It’s remarkable that BluePulse has grown to be more than twice the size of Twitter without any desktop web interface.

So how do people use Bluepulse?

You can click on your friends’ contact information and send them a message, which can be emailed and sent to their Bluepulse. That way they can receive it on the mobile web if they decide to join. Also, if you update your status on Bluepulse, it will automatically send a message to update your friends. These services are popular not only in the US, but in mobile centric countries like South Africa and India where users are more likely to have phones than PCs.

There are also a number of improvements coming to users over the next few weeks. One of which is that your friends will be able to read messages from you without joining Bluepulse. That will allow you to use Blupulse as your central mobile messaging portal without your friends having to sign up as well. Your inbox will also begin showing messages by topic and allow you to expand the conversation into a threaded view.

Ben’s view of the mobile messaging ecosystem is particularly unique. As messaging platforms like email, SMS and IM begin to converge in the mobile space, he wants to make it as easy as possible to communicate on the mobile web. Allowing users to communicate with friends that aren’t on the platform is a great way to encourage conversation and get the word out on Bluepulse.

I’ll be checking out the application more once they begin to allow off-platform communications tomorrow and will be following up with Ben to keep you posted as their service continues to grow. Check out the screenshot after the jump.

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