Fun Text spreads the Joy of Text, with “emotional messaging”

Rating: New mobile social networker dedicated to sending funny clips and jokes by text

Don’t be mislead by the title of Fun Texts’ new service. “Emotional messaging”, which sounds like something Emo kids do, is called that because it’s designed to express clear emotional content. The way it tries to achieve this is by creating a medium between SMS and MMS, where video clips, photos and graphical emoticons can be inserted into a functional SMS.

Where do the funny clips come from?
Fun Text has partnered with LA-based mobile channel Comedy Time, a popular comedy channel on mobile. Comedy Time will be taking humorous content like stand-up gigs and editing them down into 30 seconds clips. These clips can then be shared among Fun Text users quickly and easily.

From the Press Release

Fun Text has really been pushing to get a lot of content available on their service. It has deals with greeting cards monster American Greetings, and movie clips from mobile video messagers Mogreets. “We want to expand the enhanced messaging category,” said James Pycock, business development director at Fun Text. “That is why we have not only partnered with greetings card giant American Greetings but have also brought in smileys and emoticons from the world of instant messenger, pokes and gifts from social networks and movie clips from Mogreets. By working with the leaders in comedy video we are creating a ‘just for fun’ section so that customers can share ‘boredom busters’ with each other.”

“Jokes are fundamentally about sharing so this is a great opportunity for us to bring it into the 21st century through peer-to-peer mobile messaging,” added Michael Goldman, president of LA-based Comedy Time. “Comedy Time has pioneered short-form comedy video for mobile and broadband and we are pleased to be bringing professionally-generated content into the world of multimedia messaging.”

What we think?

There’s a general air of depression around the world at the moment, thanks to the economic downturn. If this service can provide us with a few titters during the day, I’m all for it. I do worry about the limited sources of content, though. They appear to only have three sources, and users might be put off by the inability to send their own content.