I know MyToday also provides the very same service, but Google’s implementation is just so amazingly simple

Yes, exposing usable interfaces to things we’ve built is not exactly something we’ve been good at. We can learn a lot from Google’s implementation. But as far as making the RSS integration easier for bloggers and other consumers of feeds, the important question to ask is, will the usage be substantial? With the internet penetration in India, will it bring in the users in large numbers? It’s a debate we’ve had internally too, and decided to focus on making sure every thing can be done via SMS. That’s worked for us, but you can be sure that we’ll put in the effort to make things better on the usability front if we can see that it is indeed bringing in a large number of users.

I guess availability of bandwidth on the SMSC is going to be an issue

A huge issue. The one issue that will determine whether the service is going to do well. I haven’t used all of the features the service provides yet, but I can see from the FAQs some of the same product design mistakes we had made. In SMS land a very small number of users can quickly ruin the QoS for everyone else unless the design accounts for abuse of every feature. It’s not just the technology, but also learning about and working through the constraints imposed by the medium that can take time.

Great point. I received an alert for a MediaNama post (ironically, the one on Google) in the morning. I’d done the post at night. I guess availability of bandwidth on the SMSC is going to be an issue. That is something which you guys also struggle with, I guess.

– Today you can subscribe to your GMail via RSS feeds. You can take the same RSS feed, and start an exclusive Google SMS channel (obviously not allowing anyone else to subscribe). That way, you’ll get an alert for each email.

Similarly, you can do a Google News search, say, for “Lewis Hamilton”, and add that RSS feed to a separate Google SMS Channel. And you create your own news alert.