With the new version of the smartphone app mysms, you can now save your text message conversations to Evernote. It’s a very useful addition to a cool tool.
Back in September, Martin Pansy, managing director of the company behind mysms, approached me to talk about his app and a potential integration with Evernote. He pitched me first the basic mysms service, which extends the SMS capability on a smartphone to other connected devices. With the app installed on your phone, any SMS you receive or send is reflected to the mysms cloud service, so you can see it on a Web browser or on any other device running a mysms application.
What’s cool is that you don’t need a new SMS phone number for this, and you don’t have to convince the people you text with to download and install a third-party messaging product. With mysms, any device becomes a terminal from which you can send or receive text messages with your current phone number. Leave your phone in the other room while you’re working a desktop PC? If the phone gets a message, you’ll see it on your PC. Or say you just want to use a big laptop or desktop keyboard to compose messages. Mysms is the tool for you.
When Martin and I met, he talked to me about how useful he thought it would be if text messages were also archived in Evernote. That way, you would never lose a text message, and you could easily search within your historic conversations. Mysms, he said, could be the gateway for this service.
It wasn’t necessary for me to do anything to enable Martin’s team to build the addition, since the Evernote APIs are open and documented, but I did officially bless the idea, and a small team here at Evernote worked with Martin’s developers as the integration was built, offering a little bit of guidance and advice as his guys did the hard work.
We’re pleased with the result. With the app running, SMS messages to your existing smartphone number are archived into a dedicated Evernote notebook. The app creates a note for each each person you trade messages with, and every time you get or send a message to a person, it is added to their note. It also archives picture messages.
There are versions of mysms for Android phones and tablets, and for iPhone and Windows Phones. You can also get it on your desktop (Windows and Mac), or just use it in a browser. It doesn’t matter how many devices you have or what operating systems they have; with mysms, all your machines get all your messages.
We think it’s a cool tool, especially for Android smartphone users (on iOS it’s not as tightly integrated with the phone, but it’s still very useful).
Get mysms in the Evernote Trunk. Direct links: Android | iOS | Windows Phone.
Rafe Needleman is Evernote’s Platform Advocate, and author of Evernote’s Opportunity Notes blog about startups.
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