We’re proud to announce a new feature: send an alert from a cell phone.

Did you ever want to alert the people who have subscribed to your keyword without logging into your account?  Now you can!  Just login to your TextMarks account or create a free 30 day trial if you haven’t already.  Choose the keyword you’d like to manage from a phone.  In the menu titled “Admin/Settings”, choose “Co-managers”.

From there, enter the phone number of the phone you’d like to manage that keyword.  You can later revoke these permissions should you choose to.

Once you’ve added a number, you can send an alert by sending a message with the following text:

ALERT KEYWORD MESSAGE

For instance, let’s say your keyword is BAR and you want to send the message “$3 Beer if you come to our Bar before 6pm and show this text.  Tell Your Friends!”

To send this, you’d text:

"ALERT BAR $3 Beer if you come to our Bar before 6pm and show this text.  Tell Your Friends!"

Your message would then be delivered to your subscribers immediately.  Login and try it now!

TextMarks allows any customer with a website, blog or email list to promote TextMarks mobile alerts.

Join the TextMarks Affiliate Program today and earn 80% commission on every sale you refer to TextMarks.com!

Anyone with a message to share and a mobile phone can use TextMarks.  Reserve your keyword now at the TextMarks site – start with our FREE unlimited TexMarks trial!

Start promoting your mobile list on your site, blog, other advertisements, or simply tell your friends and customers to text your keyword to 41411.

TextMarks offers unlimited ad-based text message alerts for groups of any size, or you can promote a TextMarks ad-free subscription starting at just $9/month!

TextMarks is perfect for group organizers, team leaders, teachers, schools, coaches, religious organizers, youth groups, non-profits, and anyone with a mobile phone and a message to share!

Become a TextMarks Affiliate now to start making money from mobile marketing.

Software Engineer, Blogger, and ColdFusion master Ben Nadel wrote a great article (inspired by a talk by Aaron Foss) describing how to get started with TextMarks and ColdFusion to build a basic SMS-enabled web app.  We’re excited to see how the ColdFusion community can continue to build on the powerful TextMarks text messaging platform.

Here’s the actual entry on Ben Nadel’s blog:

Using SMS Short Codes And TextMarks To Send Text Messages With ColdFusion

And here’s a followup Ben did showing how to use TextMarks powerful “Contextual Response” feature (docs here) to make request/response text message interactions easier for users:

Using Contextual SMS Short Code Messages With TextMarks And ColdFusion

Want to broadcast an alert to your TextMark group AND update Twitter at the same time?  No problem.

Just open up the “Auto-Post to Social Networks” box in your TextMark’s management control panel, and follow the easy instructions to safely and securely link your Twitter account to your keyword(s).

TextMarks is pleased to announce the beta release of our V2 API.

Whereas our old APIs allowed clients to perform a few actions like subscribing users and broadcasting messages, this new API exposes almost every possible action you might want to perform on your users, TextMarks, groups, and more.  And with easier-to-parse JSON responses and free PHP and Python client libraries, it couldn’t be quicker and simpler to integrate with TextMarks.

We’ll continue to maintain our old APIs for legacy applications, but we strongly recommend clients upgrade to our new APIs.  Developers considering new integrations should absolutely use our new V2 API.

Find out more in our Developer Center:

http://www.textmarks.com/dev/docs/api2/

Each TextMark’s public page (http://www.textmarks.com/YOURKEYWORD) now has a new button that looks like this:

With a few clicks, you’ll be able to share your keyword on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, or any other number of social networks and web sites.

Each TextMark now has its own RSS feed!  The feed carries the alerts and messages posted to that TextMark.

This opens up a world of possibilities for developers seeking easy ways to integrate with TextMarks as well as users who want to view messages on custom home pages (such as My Yahoo or iGoogle) or feed integration tools (FeedBurner, etc.).

You’ll find a link to each TextMark’s RSS feed on its public page (http://www.textmarks.com/YOURKEYWORD) as well as the management console section “Review Messages”.

Let us know how you’re using these new RSS feeds.

We’ve seen how more and more users are using TextMarks to represent and manage groups of people, so we’re introducing some new terminology and commands to make this more natural:

• “Subscribe to TextMark” => “Join TextMark group”.
• “Unsubscribe from TextMark” => “Leave TextMark group”.
• “SUB” and “SUBSCRIBE” commands => “JOIN” command.
• “UNSUB” and “UNSUBSCRIBE” commands => “LEAVE” command.

The old commands and terminology are still valid, but you may see some of these new terms in system messages, on our site, and in our new V2 API.

When a user subscribes to / joins a TextMark group, they receive a welcome text message with opt-out instructions.  Up until now, this text message was straightforward, generic, and not customizable.

To allow TextMarks managers to present their service or brand in the manner most appropriate for their users, we are now allowing customization of these welcome messages.

In your TextMarks Management Panel, in the “Configuration” section, you will now see a “Welcome Message” section.  You may fill in the fields here to present a customized welcome message, or leave them blank to use the default.  Make sure the test the message to ensure it’s working properly — just unsubscribe & then re-subscribe to your TextMark to receive it yourself.

Note that custom welcome messages are available to Pro Service clients only.

Up until now, if you wanted to make an SMS request with parameters, you had to put a SPACE after your keyword, like:

myweather 94117

TextMarks now supports three additional characters you may use to separate your keyword from your parameters: * – ,

The above example could be requested with any of the following:

myweather*94117
myweather-94117
myweather, 94117 

What this lets you do is build a single keyword, but promote it as if it were lots of different ones.  As a final example, say you built a “COMPSCI” keyword that returns information about specific classes.  You might promote it as follows, making each class appear to have its own keyword:

“Text COMPSCI-114 to 41411 for info on CS114: Algorithms”
“Text COMPSCI-175 to 41411 for info on CS175: Graphics”

… etc., each of which would pass “114″ or “175″ or anything else to the single “COMPSCI” TextMark.