textmarks

Please visit our new Developers Center for all developer and API resources: http://www.textmarks.com/dev

Primary interfaces for mobilizing web applications with the

TextMarks Mobile Application Services Platform (TMMASP) are:

• SMS request/response, widgets, and alerts API.
• SMS request/response allows users to send text messages withyour keyword(s) to 41411. TMMASP instantly makes an HTTP request toa URL you specify containing information from the request (including request text, user's phone number, etc.). Your servers process the request and respond with XML, HTML, or simply raw text.

TMMASP then parses the response and optionally sends a text message back to the user with your data. This can be the "answer" the user wanted, the result of an operation requested by the user, or the next step in a menu navigation you define.

• TextMarks widgets are available for you to easily embed (with

just a line of HTML) on your web pages, blog, profile page, or even
intranet applications. Users can subscribe to TextMarks, view
current TextMarks contents, and more.

• TextMarks Alerts API is an XML-RPC (XML over HTTP) interface for your applications to programatically broadcast text alerts to

your TextMark subscribers. (Without the API, you can still
broadcast alerts manually from the TextMarks web site or from your
mobile phone).

* To request an API key, visit our Developers Center

by clicking the "Developers" tab: http://www.textmarks.com/dev/api/reg/

URL Variable Substitution

• To link your TextMark to dynamic web data, you can include up to 9 variables in TextMarks that get their information from a URL.

*Include 1, 2, ... 9 in the URL and these variables will be replaced by the words that follow the TextMark in the request, or use to get all words following the TextMark.
u is substituted with a numeric ID that will be unique and consistent for each user/phone.
p is substituted with the requesting user's phone number.

• To use these feature you should disable the message posting option in your TextMark via the management control panel (so extra words aren't treated as messages).

*For example, try requesting the TextMark AMAZON followed by the ISBN number of a book. You will receive the price of that book on Amazon. The URL for that TextMark is: "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1/".

Contextual Responses for Multiple Choice Menus & Voting

• Allow users to quickly reply by SMS without having to type your keyword again.
• Effectively automatically prepends your keyword to the short (one or two char) messages sent by users.

In conjunction with dynamic TextMarks, allows you to provide easy menus, polls, multiple choice questions, etc.

• Details: After any TextMark request, alert, etc., that keyword remains as the user's active implicit context. Short responses (details below) are assumed to be in that context, and treated as if the user had typed your keyword first.
• Zip codes and Email addresses are also considered as contextual responses.

"Short responses" are defined as one character responses (a-t, A-T, 0-9), or two character responses (a-z, A-Z, 0-9). Examples: 1, 2, 14, 05, 99, a, t, f, CA, SF, J7... Note that single character responses u-z and U-Z are reserved by TextMarks.

• Short responses can be used for global options (e.g. state/country codes), or can be used for infinite depth menu navigation by keeping sessions per user and using (e.g.) "u" in URL to identify users/sessions.
• For a demo of this functionality, try requesting the STATEINFO TextMark by texting STATEINFO to 41411 or going to: http://www.textmarks.com/STATEINFO