In this announcement for the app on the Yahoo Mail blog, there is only mention of an Android version, and no mention of an iPhone version, though an iPhone is shown in the image provided (above) – I guess to just show that iPhone users can still get text messages from it.

“For those heavy texters out there, we are excited to introduce Hub, a fast and easy-to-use mobile messaging app that allows you to send text messages and have group conversations for free,” says the Yahoo Mail team. “Hub allows you to easily add participants to any conversation thread so it’s easy to switch from private messaging to a group conversation. Whether it is just keeping up with a close group of friends or making spontaneous plans, you no longer have to deal with scattered messages.”

“What’s more, Hub allows you to send messages to anyone without incurring any text messaging fees,” the company adds. “Yes, you heard us right. There are no text messaging fees – messages are sent over WIFI or using your data connection – and Hub is device agnostic, which means you can communicate with anyone on any mobile device as long as you have their mobile phone numbers. Your friends are not required to download the app in order to reply to your messages although they are strongly encouraged to do so in order to enjoy the full feature set!”

This isn’t the first app to to offer free text messaging, but the Yahoo brand probably won’t hurt in it getting some downloads. It has group messaging, and support for local and international SMS messages.

You do have to have a Yahoo ID to use the app from the looks of it.

Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new version of Yahoo Messenger (11.5). Yahoo lists the highlights as follows:

Now, it has been revealed that AT&T is going to offer only unlimited text messing plans starting August 21. There was previously a $10 plan for 1,000 messages.

Engadget, who first learned about the plans, shares in an article called “AT&T Streamlining Individual Messaging Plans August 21st, Leaving Unlimited As the Sole Survivor,” this official statement from AT&T:

“We regularly evaluate our offers and are making some adjustments to our messaging lineup.

Starting August 21, we’re streamlining our text messaging plans for new customers and will offer an unlimited plan for individuals for $20 per month and an unlimited plan for families of up to five lines for $30 per month. The vast majority of our messaging customers prefer unlimited plans and with text messaging growth stronger than ever, that number continues to climb among new customers. Existing customers don’t have to change any messaging plan they have today, even when changing handsets.”

There is plenty of reaction around the tech blogosphere as you could imagine. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler goes so far as to say on his personal blog, “A cynical person may think that AT&T are being huge fucking scumbags here. Really, they’re just ‘streamlining’ their plans. Just like when they ‘streamlined’ their plans by removing unlimited data a few months back. It’s all in the name of what’s best for the consumer. What class acts.”

Here’s some reaction from the Twitterverse:

Some are complaining about the service itself:

In other AT&T news, Reuters reports that the company is suing customers who are trying to block its deal with T-Mobile.

Face it, it’s cheaper to upgrade a mobile phone than it is a home computer or a laptop.

That being said, the mobile phone industry is absolutely booming with what appears to be recession-proof growth. According to the latest study from Pew Internet, just about everybody in the United States has a mobile phone. While that may sound like hyperbole, it’s actually much closer to the truth than you might first realize.

The report reveals that 83 percent of American adults own a mobile phone. With such a proliferation, one wonders why companies like Time-Warner and AT&T even bother with home service when it comes to phones. You can never have too much access to voice-over communication, apparently.

While the 83 percent is a staggering amount, there are other details of note.

Pew Internet also distinguished between simple mobile phones and the growing-in-popularity smartphone. While it wasn’t clearly stated, the apparent difference between a simple cellular phone and a smartphone is the data plan. If your phone requires a data plan, it’s probably a smartphone, at least in the eyes of survey takers. In regards to smartphone ownership, 35 percent of American adults own either an iPhone, Android or a Blackberry (with a data plan subscription, of course).

I’ll leave the fact that 83 percent plus 35 percent is more than 100 percent, meaning, it’s pretty clear some of that 83 percent had to be factored into the smartphone ownership result.

Moving on, when it comes to mobile phone activities, sending text messages is king. 73 percent of mobile phone owners send text messages and take pictures, an activity included in the text message percentages.

Other interesting findings include:

The survey also breaks down the difference in use between smartphone users and plain old mobile phone users, which they presented in a chart:

The question I have is, how long before these numbers switch? How long will it take for smartphone owners to outnumber their mobile phone owning counterparts? Let us know what you think.

In fact, neither Apple’s service or their ubiquitous phone are number one for any of the categories comScore studied. As far as the devices themselves go, the leading manufacturer (OEM)m is Samsung. According to comScore’s study, Samsung is responsible 24.5 percent of phones used by mobile subscribers, followed by LG (20.9), Motorola (15.6), Apple and RIM with 8.3 and 8.2 percent, respectively. On the other hand, comScore also points out that Apple had the largest growth between January and April, seeing 1.3 percentage points worth or it. Nevertheless, that’s still 16 percentage points behind Samsung, the category’s leader. The chart in question:

When it comes to the most popular smartphone in terms of usage, it’s clearly becoming an Android versus iPhone scenario (or Google versus Apple, if you will) as Microsoft, RIM and Palm all saw their marketshare dwindle in comparison to Google and Apple. In regards to Google/Android, comScore’s study reveals the company previously best known for searching the Internet now finds themselves with a sizable chunk of the mobile phone industry. Between January 2011 until April 2011, phones using the Android operating system gained 5.3 percentage points, while Apple only gained another 1.3 percent. Conversely, RIM, makers of the BlackBerry devices, saw an almost 5 percent loss of its market share.

As for Microsoft and Palm, well, there’s always other devices to concentrate on.

Surprisingly, game-playing ranked fifth on comScore’s list, with social media site access and downloading apps being more popular than playing Angry Birds. The chart in question:

There are free features as well as upgrade features available. For free, users can receive text notifications when users are added or removed, when the theme changes, and/or when the privacy settings change. 

With the Text Messaging Upgrade, users can protect their blog by using a two-step login process, and a text message will be sent to their phone upon login with a passcode that must be entered in order to access the Dashboard. 

With the upgrade, users can also get notified of new comments and moderate them with a text reply, as well as send a reply to comments they receive. Finally, users can send a text for a new post to be added to the blog instantly. 

The new text features are only available in the U.S. at this point. Standard text message and data rates apply, of course. 

The upgrade costs $20 a year. It can be accessed from the Dashboard. 

I can’t imagine blogging through SMS being very fun, but it could come in handy if something comes up, and you don’t have access to a computer, but you need to blog about it. The other features should be quite useful. 

Original Article: According to reports, T-Mobile may start charging businesses extra for sending large amounts of texts over its network, beginning at the beginning of October. ChaCha, whose service is largely based on sending text messages to users, appears to be pretty pissed off at the notion. WebProNews received the following statement from ChaCha CEO Scott Jones, indicating as much:

“Given that the costs to deliver text are miniscule, T-Mobile already makes profits from what they charge their customers, aggregators, and publishers.  There, T-mobile is “triple dipping.”  We don’t see any reason for this, other than greed.

"As always, it is free to receive notifications and standard text messaging rates apply to sending," says Twitter’s Kevin Thau. "It’s the same pricing as sending and receiving text messages from friends."

To use the feature, users can simply send "START" to 0198089488. This page shows all of the official Twitter Text Commands. Twitter recommends Aussies follow the following accounts:

@australian (News from The Australian newspaper)
@delta_goodrem (Musician)
@kyleandjackieo (Australia’s #1 radio show)
@DanniiMinogue (Team Minogue judge for The X Factor)
@KevinRuddPM (Prime Minister)

To follow via SMS, just send "FOLLOW" and the username.

Twitter says more countries and more carriers will be coming soon. Aside from Australia, Twitter already has such support for the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Related Articles: 

> Google SMS Launches

> Twitter Expands SMS Tweeting in Canada

> Text Messaging Right From Gmail

Sound familiar? That’s probably because you can do basically the same thing with Twitter. This is just the latest example of Facebook acknowleging (without coming right out and saying it) that they view Twitter as a major competitor. If this wasn’t evident enough upon the last major redesign change, which switched to a Twitter-esque real-time status feed, it’s even more clear now.

Facebook is certainly the dominant force in social networking currently, but there was a time when you might’ve said the same about MySpace. Twitter continues to grow rapidly (despite retention issues). It’s not really showing any signs of slowing yet, and Facebook is well aware of this.

The option to subscribe to Friend updates via SMS is a smart move on Facebook’s part. It has been, after all, a big contributor to the success of Twitter in the first place. As more and more people are using their mobile devices to use their social networks. It’s simply just a logical step, and frankly an overdue one.

It is a good thing they did it on a friend-by-friend basis, because I can’t see too many people being incredibly stoked about the chance to receive every update in their news feed via text message. It would be going non-stop.

When you receive a text message of a status update. You can simply reply to the message to leave a comment on the update. And in addition to receiving updates from your friends, you can do the same with Facebook Pages.

"If you already have Facebook Mobile activated for your phone or device, then you will begin receiving the text message updates after confirming your subscription," notes Phil on the Facebook blog. "If you haven’t yet set up Facebook Mobile, you will be taken through a series of steps to activate it before receiving text messages."

If you decide you don’t want to receive text messages from anyone you subscribed to, you can unsubscribe by:

- replying directly from your phone with "unsubscribe"

- returning to the friend’s profile (or Page) and clicking the "unsubscribe from SMS updates" link

- Editing your mobile texts settings from the Facebook mobile app.

The feature is available in 18 countries right now, but Facebook says it is expanding it around the world. The service is free on Facebooks’s end, but obviously standard fees from your provider will still stand. In other mobile social news, Google released a mobile app for Orkut.

First of all, it has been discovered that Facebook Page owners can have people sign up to become fans via text message. Users can become a fan by texting "fan yourpage" to Facebooks’s shortcode – 32665, which spells FBOOK on your phone. Mashable’s Adam Ostrow says:

The feature appears to be very beta, and hasn’t been enabled for every Page admin yet. An additional caveat seems to be that for Fans to successfully opt-in, they need to have setup their mobile phone to receive texts from Facebook, which can be done from your Settings page. Unfortunately, T-Mobile isn’t on Facebook’s list of supported carriers, meaning I currently get an “access denied” error when trying to Fan stuff via text (most other major carriers are supported, however).

Comment on this story.

The second item is Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg talking about the ill-received redesign. She says that she doesn’t know why so many people reacted negatively toward the new design, and that a lower percentage had complaints than did for previous site changes. She also mentioned Twitter. CNET’s Charles Cooper quotes her:

"What’s interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update," she said. "We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web…Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they’re doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them–nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr."

Comment on this story.

And last, but certainly not least, Facebook is reportedly looking for up to $100 milion in financing. BusinessWeek reports:

Specifically, the company is looking for a handful of credit lines that would help it finance leases for the growing number of computers it needs to run its popular Web site. Such leases are used by well-known companies, including Google’s (GOOG) YouTube video service, and are a common way to finance equipment purchases in Silicon Valley.

According to BW, Facebook has already come up with $500 million. The company has gone to Bank of America and other large financial institutions looking for credit.

Discuss your thoughts on any of these three stories with other WebProNews readers in the comments section below.

Google has offered SMS in its chat since October, and Chat in general for quite some time. They have also launched voice and video chat recently.

Anyhow, with Yahoo’s chat you can communicate with other people using Yahoo as well as mobile phones. Product Manager Brandon Savage writes:

How does it work, you ask? Well, when you sign into your Yahoo! Mail Classic account, your Chat & Mobile Text contact list will appear on the left of your screen (you can place it above or below your personal folders, whichever you prefer). If your status says “Offline,” just click on it and select “Available” to sign in (fair warning to Yahoo! Messenger users: signing in here will log you out elsewhere). Once you do, you’ll see a list of all of your Contacts who are online and available to chat. We also show you the names of any Contacts with mobile phone numbers, for mobile texting, of course. Just click on a name to start a conversation!

The competition between Yahoo and Google in email certainly does seem to be heating up lately. Back in the summer, Yahoo unveiled its offline email client, which Google has just gotten around to. It will be interesting to see what the market share looks like later in th year.