FunMail tries to make picture messaging relevant - but only on iPhone

I was back at CTIA in San Diego that I first got shown the newest product from FunMobility. With the release date set, I was sworn to secrecy, but now that restriction is lifted. And so we can have a look at a new visual texting concept from the company - FunMail.

At the moment, FunMail is only available to iPhone users. It’s a free application that you can use to send SMS. Once you’ve finished typing your SMS, FunMail scans the contents and, based on what you’ve written, pulls up a selection of images that you can attach to the text. Not only that, but you can take a picture through FunMail and attach SMS text to it before you send.

My immediate first reaction to this was “isn’t this just MMS? And isn’t MMS used by basically no one?” Well, this isn’t quite the same as MMS. It has some distinct advantages.

MMS is quite slow to use. I know - I’ve sent people MMS before. I’ve been in the situation where I’ve seen a funny sign that a friend would love. 3 - 5 mins later, I’m sending an MMS. That’s too long. It takes literally seconds to send an SMS, and that is one of the things that FunMail has really tried to emulate. The system is built for speed.

How does it work?

You type in your SMS, and the FunMail presents you with a selection of “cute, comical or irreverent” pics that should relate to your SMS. At the CTIA demo, FunMobility asked me to suggest any message I wanted. Being Irish, I naturally said “Fancy a pint?” and the system presented a rake of beer and pub pictures. Ok, point made. But FunMail also incorporates your text into the message - so the “Fancy a pint?” SMS was presented inside the image in a relevant font. Again, all of this is done with very fast.

The Media Brain

My next criticism was that with a limited pool of pictures, users would soon get bored. And this is where things got a little interesting. FunMail uses a system called The Media Brain to expand the number of pictures in its database. The Media Brain is powered by a complex open-source engine called the Semantic Media Project - which FunMail uses to scan content from Flickr and Creative Commons. Based on image tags and other metadata, The Media Brain can draw in additional relevant pictures from Flickr. Of course, this is only with the permission of the image owner - and FunMobility encourages and rewards people for submitting and properly tagging pictures to the FunMail database.

What we think?

As picture messaging services go, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen, but that doesn’t mean I think it will succeed. I do believe that FunMail has focused on THE most important thing in this service: speed. Unless you can send a picture message at about the same speed as you can send a regular SMS (or email or IM, these days) then it won’t go anywhere.

As for the The Media Brain…. hmmm. It sounds pretty fancy, yes. But I’ll have to see what the FunMail database looks like after a few weeks of exposure to the real world before I decide one way or the other.

Also, it’s going to need to be available on a hell of a lot more platforms than iPhone if FunMobility wants to see mass usage!