Verizon also prevents its customers from receiving SMS from Rebtel customers outside of the U.S.

Well, it now appears that AT&T Wireless has started playing games with SMS, targeting messages that its customers send to themselves or receive from friends using Rebtel services both from http://www.rebtel.com as well as from Rebtel’s free Facebook conference call service, Group Talk.

To avoid the indictment of blocking Rebtel SMS, it looks like AT&T has turned all SMS from Rebtel services into what’s called Flash SMS. As a result, the messages are only temporarily stored when displayed; as soon as you close the message, it disappears and is not automatically stored in the phones Inbox.

I’m told by my more technical colleges that this is no coincidence that there is a trigger value that has to be set by AT&T to make the SMS into a Flash SMS, instead of a normal message.

I know this is happening because I’m an AT&T Wireless customer and experience their nasty trick regularly when I receive Group Talk notifications for free conference calls. And, friends who are also AT&T subscribers report the same experience.

So Shame on you AT&T Wireless. This is a dirty trick right out of the Verizon playbook, and it’s time to stop.

As some of you might know, not too long ago we launched a brand new, really neat Facebook app called Group Talk . Group Talk allows users to set up conference calls with each other in a truly simplified manner. You don’t even have to be a Facebook member to join in on the conversation – how sweet is that?

Recently, Group Talk got some well-deserved attention from the wicked people over at the blog Facebook Applications . They write reviews on different, cool, and useful apps you can find on Facebook, and recently they wrote about us (woohoo!!). Here is a short snippet from the review:

“…for people like me living abroad with so many friends to call and so many hours spend in websites providing services like this application does, Group Talk is a really interesting application that lets me stay checking all my stuff in my Facebook plus get connected for free in some cases, or at really cheap rates, with a great quality of sound.”

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the nice people over at Facebook Applications for the wonderful review (they gave us 4 out of a possible 5, woohoo again!). Thanks guys. Please keep providing all the Social Media and Facebook types like us and others out there with insightful reports!

Lastly, if you have written a review about our Facebook app, our service in general, or have any tips or suggestions on how we can make what we are doing better, please do not hesitate to send an email our way.

Until next time, have a wonderful week!

If you’re not a Facebook user you should join just to use Group Talk.  It makes it super easy to set up free conference calls and has lots of cool bells and whistles worth checking out. 

Once you’ve downloaded Group Talk you can set up a free conference call with as may people as you want in less than a minute.  You just enter your Facebook friends’ names, and click Add.  You can then make the call private – just for the people invited – or public, which makes the call open to any of your friends who want to join. To include people who are not Facebook users you enter the participants’ names, mobile phone numbers or landline numbers and their email addresses, and click Add.  That’s it. Everyone invited to a Group Talk call automatically receives a local dial-in number in the city or country where they live via SMS (text message) or email.  For the first person who joins a conference call, Group Talk offers to notify all of the other invited participants that the Group Talk session is starting. 

Facebook users are able to see public Group Talk conference calls as they’re happening that have been set up by their friends, by members of the Facebook groups that they’ve joined, or by the organizers of events they’ve been invited to attend, and can get a phone number to join any of those Group Talk calls with a single click of the mouse. 

And because Group Talk is built by Rebtel, conference call participants’ personal phone numbers are always kept private. 

Group Talk conference calls are always free – no matter how long you talk. So give it a try.  Do something fun.  Get your friends or family together to celebrate someone’s birthday.  If you’re an Aussie living abroad, set up a Group Talk call with all your mates back home the Saturday after next for Australia Day.  And now that Rebtel is up and running in Shanghai don’t forget Chinese New Year – it’s just around the corner. But whatever you do with Group Talk please drop us a line and tell us what you think.  We hope you enjoy it. Happy talking.

Novel this may be – in the telecoms industry, at least – but ever since we started it’s been Rebtel’s goal to be an active, disruptive force for change.

We aim to empower our customers, not just by saving them money, but by opening their eyes to the mobile operators’ unethical behaviour and thereby, we hope, bringing about positive changes throughout the entire industry.

Thing is, we’d like to do a bit more than this. We’ve been pondering how to use Rebtel’s technology as a positive force, not just on an individual scale, but on a global one too. How can we help people to express their opinions and voice their protests about things that matter far more than dollars saved on phone calls?

And that’s when we came up with Call for Change – a new program that permits customers to use our technology to disrupt more than the mobile industry. If a hundred people can trigger change by voicing their opinions in front of an embassy, why not use mobile technology to enable hundreds of thousands of people to make their voices heard from afar?

Why not, for example, jam the switchboards of a repressive regime’s embassy around the world, at no cost to the protester? Why not set up a telephone voting system so callers can express their dissatisfaction in a matter of seconds, absolutely free?

With this in mind we recently ran our Call for Change Burma campaign on Facebook, encouraging Facebook users to flood the switchboards of Burmese embassies worldwide to register their disapproval at the atrocities there.

But we want to do so much more.

How can Rebtel technology help organisations like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders or Friends of the Earth?

Do you run an organisation that could benefit from our technology?

If there is anything we can do for you, please call Greg on +1 415 717 4666 or click here to get a local number where you live to let us know what we can do to help you Call for Change.

I think it is Jeff Pulver who raised the stakes by offering a reward for “cool” VOIP apps. It’s true, there is a quest for coolness here, coolness meaning anything that is not “Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail” in Jeff’s words. So, what would be compelling then?. Jeff writes:

(…) after listening to Brian Whitton speak, it became clear to me there is still a great opportunity to disrupt the communications industry, if for no other reason, than because of the amount of business processes in place at Verizon (and other incumbent Telcos) before a new service is deployed. In fact, in the time it takes for the financial analysts at Verizon work out the operating budgets for doing a voice over ATM rollout and the time engineering spends trying to justify the “risks” for deploying an IP Voice solution, the seed of a communications revolution could planted and sown. All it takes are like minded people who want to change the way we communicate and the guts to take on the status-quo. And what is better than the present time to reboot and restart the Internet Communications revolution?

Well, yes. However, rebooting in this business to us means giving people the easiest means to accessing VOIP from their ordinary phones. After all VOIP is but a technology for transferring Voice over IP: it’s not a service in and of itself. I would guess that more than 90% of mobile calls are initiated from our phones’ address books. Increasingly, people have free local minutes included in their calling plans. We figured it would be cool to turn those minutes into local calls, especially if you want to call internationally.

Sometimes I think “compelling” services are only compelling for those already in the know, the inner circle of VOIP watchers, so to speak. Twitter and Facebook are often mentioned, and Jeff mentions them too. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that those services are so successful because they remove clutter and simplify things, while offering a wealth of access options to their basic service offering. It’s true, there’s a wealth of opportunity in VOIP, but it is through simplicity that the revolution will happen. Rebtel: simple stuff: use your address book to call your international contacts for next to nothing, or even free if you make smart calls. That’s cool enough for us.

As Rebtel developer Ola Sundqvist explains, it’s now possible to do everything on Facebook that you can do at Rebtel.com, apart from crediting your account which, for security reasons, must be done at our main site. We provide Facebook users with free credit so they can try the service immediately – and if their friends sign up they receive more credit, which should help promote the viral spread of the app through interconnected groups of friends.

Despite the ease with which you can form connections on the internet, research shows that online networks tend to grow from offline ones, whether that’s a group of work colleagues, students at the same university, or members of a social group based around sport or leisure activities. Here at Rebtel, we think it makes sense to extend communication outwards from Facebook back to the ‘offline’ world by developing a mobile application.

Most other VoIP-based services require the use of a computer to initiate the call: with Rebtel, once the number has been generated, the customer saves and dials it as they would any other number. In this way, Rebtel brings voice to the world of social networking, expanding the number of ways in which Facebook users can interact with each other by providing a cost-effective, real-life means of communication that segues seamlessly with their chosen networking platform.

As Rebtel CEO Hjalmar Windbladh points out in an interview on the Jeff Pulver blog, “[with Reb Me] Rebtel becomes an integral part of social networking, bringing mobility to the party. Now you can reach all your friends when not online with just a local call. There are no exorbitant long distance charges, and you’re calling right from your mobile phone, not chained to your desk.”

Can you briefly describe Reb Me?

OLA: It’s like a web service that converts your mobile or international number into a landline number. When calling this generated number our servers connect you over the internet, charging almost nothing for it so you save tons of money calling abroad with mobiles or landline.

Why should Facebook users be excited about the Reb Me application?

OLA: Facebook is a huge global community expanding with some 100 000 users per day. People are connecting and nothing beats calling a person and communicating in real life. With this application any Facebook user can create numbers and call any of their Facebook friends really cheaply. The Rebtel website is super-advanced and quite heavy to load. The Facebook app is sleek and lean to use. We even provide free minutes to the Facebook users to try it out. Charging your account won’t be needed until those run out, and charging your account is the only thing you can’t do with the Reb Me application due to security etc.

What safeguards are in place to protect theft of data or other similar problems?

OLA: When signing up with Facebook you sign up to allow your information to be sold. This is one of the major revenues of Facebook. Rebtel don’t sell information and have a strict policy of privacy. No information is saved into the Facebook database when using the Reb Me application. When logging in to Rebtel.com, security socket layers are always used to protect information.

Can you talk a little about the technologies used to create the Facebook app (FBML, FQL, etc.)

OLA: I have used FBML as much as possible, and when it was not possible I studied the source HTML and CSS of the Facebook website to keep things as similar as possible. This makes the application to melt well with design and what Facebook users are used to, keeping it tidy and simple. FBML is converted into HTML that matches out-of-the-box classes provided by Facebook. This saves loading times and whenever there’s a minor bug in the FBML code, the page won’t work at all. This keeps things in good health as everything has to be perfect to run at all, much like the C# that needs to compile before it can run.

Was it tricky to conform to Facebook guidelines on appearance and content while still maintaining a Rebtel identity? Or did you find the restrictions to be useful in any way?

OLA: I love restrictions. This keeps things in place and working on majority of all platforms. It was tough keeping a balance of the company brand and the Facebook layout. In the end we stuck to keeping it look and feel like Facebook with our logotype and symbol for branding on all pages. In the profile the branding of Rebtel is with emphasis using a rounded corner box as container for the shortcut links where the links are also coloured with the “Rebtel blue” colour. In order to make the pages branded and more fun to look at, we also included most of our “Hippies”. This makes it feel a bit personal and lightens up all that textual content. Learning the FBM language was quick as I’ve worked with markup languages since the mid 90’s and there were not that many tags to learn. We had to do a little workaround to put all custom styles in once place using a master template rather than including and external stylesheet document as this is not allowed on Facebook.

What do you feel are the main concepts that entrepreneurs and investors should understand about the Facebook platform? Do you think Facebook apps are set to replace consumer-facing websites?

OLA: Remember, Facebook is just another website. It’s popular today and I agree it’s as good as it gets by 2007 standards. With some time and skills, anyone can set up something similar based on Open Source platforms like Joomla and Community Builder. Any company should build an app on Facebook as it can be done in days. It’s also important to profile your company on Facebook with your CEO having a page and a company that can be selectable from the lists as employers on Facebook.

Facebook has 24 million active users – any worries about server load?

OLA: So far we have been worrying too much about server load and to little about spreading the word. We have a nifty load balanced solution and any issue can be solved with hardware. According to my own guess Rebtel needs about 1 million users to look good and 2 million to get those happy 2.0 vibes going.

Any concerns about timing? It’s been suggested that Facebook users are already suffering from ‘app fatigue’… how does Reb Me plan to work around this?

OLA: There were about 2000 apps on Facebook when creating the Rebtel app and that will likely grow fast from now on. Good apps will succeed anyway. I still believe the purpose of the Reb Me app is unique and that it’s a great service we are providing for people. There may be fatigue about all those ‘fun’ applications with never about anything as useful as this.

Do you think that Rebtel on Facebook is better for the consumer? How is Rebtel functionality improved through Facebook integration?

OLA: I think we are improving our usability and flows. People internally almost prefer using the Facebook app rather than the real Rebel website as it is so lean and clean. I believe Rebtel will have to improve on letting users increase their personal privacy security levels when putting external applications out like this.

What do you feel differentiates Reb Me from its competitors’ Facebook apps? (Jangl, SkypeMe, etc)?

OLA: I’ve always felt that Jangl and SkypeMe are very connected to a computer while Rebtel is connected to a standard phone. I don’t even see us as competitors. Rebtel has a unique angle in the market. When it comes to the Reb Me app, the Jangl and SkypeMe apps seems like hasty jobs where not that many features have been put into the app. We have focused on putting as much real functionality as possible into it. A large focus has been on copywriting and icons as well, constantly improving the app.