Airtel launches IM for community members

by: Tony Alton Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Rating: social networking for those without a PC

India’s Bharti Airtel is to launch a new service called Airtel Messenger, which enables mobile users to text chat within a personalised set of communities. Users can send and receive messages in real-time via their mobile phones, plus personalised features that include status tag options such as ‘Offline/Online’, ‘I am Busy’ or ‘In a Meeting. Its presence-enabled address book means that the sender knows when their contacts are ‘online’.

Users are also able to make multiple text conversations simultaneously using Airtel Messenger.

Airtel customer need a GPRS & Airtel Live activated handset to register for the service simply by sending an SMS to 57070 with the message ‘IM’. Once they’ve registered, users can create their own messaging communities by adding friends from their phone book or manually adding new contacts.

The Airtel Messenger service is free of charge until August 31, 2007, after which users will have to pay an unspecified tariff.

This is good news for the many Indians who haven’t got access to a PC and the Internet, but have got a 2.5G phone.