The New York Times Launches “News Via Text Message”

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

The News York Times, home of “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” launched “All The News That’s Fit to Text” on Friday. The new service will deliver features and columns from the NYT as well as features from The Times Magazine via text message to cell phones and mobile devices.

To use it, send a keyword to 698698 (NYTNYT) and you will either get the latest three articles from that given section or the most recent column from their favorite columnist in a particular section.

Nice idea, but the limitations of text messages (160 characters or less) make the service less than ideal. What you get back from the NYT will be a short blurb with an URL to the story, or a short blurb asking you to reply with “m” for “more” or “3″ or some other digit for “desc” which I assume means description. I could never get it to work.

Trying to get more information using the reply function leads to frustration, and using the URL defeats being able to use the messaging feature to eliminate the need for a data plan to surf to the site. I mean, if you have to web surf there anyway, why not just use your browser in the first place?

Also, a few times I sent a keyword, and never got anything back. Looks like there are still bugs to work out.

The list of sections is above. You can go to the press release to see the list of columnists, etc. Just remember: the service still has a lot of issues, as I indicated. If they can work the kinks out, it might not be bad, but the limits of text messages will always place a limit on the usability of this service.