Free SMS. To each!

Anyone who has ever been interested in the history of the Hotmail service (at least by reading the English-language Wikipedia article of the same name to read and jump from there via hyperlinks to primary sources), of course, knows that this service, which is currently called “Windows Live Hotmail ”(and several years earlier it was called“ MSN Hotmail ”) did not always belong to Microsoft Corporation, but was acquired by it in 1997. Hotmail was launched in July 1996 by two Internet users named Sabir Bhatia (Sabeer Bhatia) and Jack Smith (Jack Smith); then he bore the name “HoTMaiL”, given with the ingenious intention that his four capital letters would be put together in the name of the HTML language.

Now, in 2011, it is even difficult to imagine or remember that then, in 1996, HoTMaiL became one of the very first sites in the history of the Internet that offered free mailboxes in its domain to anyone who wanted it; The usual for that time was, on the contrary, the use of e-mail mailboxes provided by the organization during employment or by the provider when connecting to the Internet - and, of course, no one could even dream of having a lifetime e-mail address, because such addresses were subject to physical destruction upon termination or upon termination of the contract with the provider. The appearance of HoTMaiL and its other analogues (no less free) was perceived by the Internet community as manna from heaven - although, unfortunately, the possibility of anonymous registration and free e-mail sending also benefited spammers.

Sabir Bhatia was born on December 30, 1968. In July 1996, he was not yet 28 years old. Meanwhile, in all the past fifteen years since then - until very recently, this Hindu, from Chandigarh, was not heard, and many of us, Internet users, even began to forget his name. New generations did not know anything about him.
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And what? In the second half of November 2011, the world spread news (I personally found it on the TECHNO bigmir) net website) that Bhatia launched the free mobile text messaging service JaxtrSMS , which “does the same thing for SMS to Hotmail for mail. JaxtrSMS provides free sending of text messages from the mobile phone of each user to any other mobile phone in the world - while the recipient will receive the message even in the (most likely) case when the recipient does not have the JaxtrSMS application installed.



JaxtrSMS is available for download on the Jaxtr website . Jaxtr is also mentioned on Wikipedia ; apparently, she is engaged in audio communication, SMS and social networks: Jaxtr offers, like Skype, calls to cheap local numbers to make international calls. Sabir Bhatia acquired Jaxtr the year before last (2009), but the company had already been mentioned on Habrahabr: pay attention to that subzamochny entry in the personal blog, which shimalsky left in 2007. In general, nothing surprising for a company that, by 2008, had 10 million users in 220 countries around the world.

The main page of the Jaxtr site made a somewhat shocking impression on me - primarily because its first screen mostly consists of a single graphic file www.jaxtr.com/user/images/image.jpg measuring 954 × 716 pixels (≈126 kilobytes). This will certainly complicate the lives of those readers who wish to copy the text, but, perhaps, it will simplify matters for those readers who wish to make a screenshot. (For example, I simplified. On the other hand, I could not have discovered this circumstance.)

I see that free SMS will have exactly the same advantages and disadvantages as free e-mail boxes : the current performance of mobile operators who charge unnatural prices for SMS will be completely tamed - but sending mobile spam will be available literally for everyone who is low enough. fell morally. I also believe that SMS will take the place of the natural mobile IM, replacing ICQ, and not Jabber and Skype.

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In conclusion, I have to admit something to all of you about IM. I do not like to pronounce an excessively long and, moreover, not at all Russian word “messenger” (not to mention the phrase “instant messenger”). And I guess: maybe not just me, but many of us do not like it. Therefore, I think this: it is time to offer the public some such word that will be better than that. Firstly, such a word should be pronounced in just two syllables (like “IM”), and not longer. Secondly, such a word must be at least half Russian.

I propose the word “ chatter ”, derived from “chat” with the help of the completely same suffix, which has long and habitually been used in the Russian words “alarm clock”, “refrigerator”, “soldering iron”, “matyulnik”, “lamp”, “kettle”, "File", "textbook", "problem book", "triangle", "receiver", "subframe", "piercer", "exchanger", "duvet cover", "chicken coop", "SUV", "igniter", and more in many others, like them. Agree: to say “chatnik” instead of “messenger” is even more convenient and shorter than to say “refrigerator” instead of “refrigerator”.

_{The word "chatnik" was coined by me on August 16, 2007 .}