Yahoo quietly launched Mixd yesterday. On the phone side, Mixd is equivalent to and even slightly better than 3Jam. Mixd’s web interface for creating and managing the SMS groups is much better than 3Jam’s though still raw and has the capability to receive and display videos and photos.

Like 3Jam, Mixd implements the IRC model over SMS. Mixd does make –- or adopts -- tiny innovations. Each invitee can be allowed or denied the privilege to invite others and each invitee can kick his child invitees from the group. Chats replies are sent to the web interface in the form of stacked talk bubbles. If the chat transcript were to be widgetized, you have the equivalent of a Twitter. There’s no API yet, but that should come later if Yahoo follows the strategy for its other services.

The phone interface was a bit confusing until I realized it was just like 3Jam. Each conversation, ie Mixer, is tracked by the initial phone number the SMS came from. Replying to that same number replies to that Mixer. For example, “Apple” Mixer is tracked by 445-556-000 and “Orange” Mixer by 445-556-001. I could not get Mixd to take the picture I sent from my Sprint phone. The receiver is a single email address pix@mixd.com so it’s not clear to me how Mixd would figure out which Mixer to sort the picture or video to.

Strategic Implications

Startups in this space like 3Jam and Twitter will lose sleep at night. Nobody has a technical or legal lock has on these simple ideas and or has a huge user base as we are still in the bowling alley phase of adoption. 3Jam is doomed unless it can find a buyer. No VC will pump more money into that venture after today. Google should pick up 3Jam’s assets for loose change to bolster their stagnating Dodgeball asset.

Dodgeball was afflicted overambition and miscalculation and now is locked into an unappealing model of operation. Whatever user base it has is growing at a snails pace and nobody is using the service. Though Google was lured by the Dodgeball’s shiny features, they didn’t realize that the “check in” location model doesn’t fly on the phone interface and with a sparsely connected early community of adopters. Simple communication ala 3Jam or Mixd is probably possible but the Dodgeball doesn’t position the service that way and non-subscribers can’t be invited into a convo which is basically an anti-viral killer. Google should pay $1 or $2 million for 3Jam and incorporate the assets into a remodeling of Dodgeball, if they still care at all. Dodgeball is a rounding error in their financials, so maybe we even bother to speculate.

Within the Yahoo house, the opportunities are rich. We won’t see them in the near term but shouldn’t be later surprised by ties between Mixd and Yahoo TV and Flickr. YouTube gets video from the web and resells to the likes of Verizon. With Mixd, Yahoo TV can reverse that flow and use phones to gather video. The UCLA student tasering incident was captured on phone video. If photos and videos prove popular on Mixd, expect YouTube to be soliciting your phone soon.

SMS group chat is pretty cool and thus far the big problem has been marketing. In my own tests, people get it quickly enough but no one really wants to use it. Yahoo applied its huge account base to Answers and got a lively community asking and answering questions. I think the same magic could work for group chat but with more modest success. Strategically it is important for Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and anybody else to mark their territory in the customer mind as SMS is merely an early transitional battleground. The real battle comes when rich phone interfaces become prevalent.

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