This could have easily been called Version 2.0 of Vakow! but it sounded too lame. Even with a ”2.0″.

Having struggled with the nomenclature for about 30 seconds and rejecting every suggestion that came up, we decided to cut corners and give you the real gravy - quick and fast.

Here’s what you’ll see in Vakow! now:

No requirement of +2 score to send SMS to your subscribers followers

Now we’ll send out SMSes to all your subscribers followers as soon as you post them. This will enable our users to post a variety of content ranging from a random thought, a movie review, a stock update or an sms forward that will be forwarded to his or her subscribers followers.

Go on, post something to your blog >>

Free Personal SMS to any phone in India

You can send personal SMSes (upto 140 chars) to any mobile phone in India, for FREE! All the SMSes that you send or receive through Vakow! are stored in your Personal Messages Inbox, and when you use it, the phone numbers get added to your address book automatically.

Send a free personal SMS >>

Receive up to 100 SMSes per day now

Now you can receive upto 100 SMSes from Vakow! per day - upto 50 SMSes from the people and tags that you are subscribed to follow and upto 50 personal SMSes from your friends.

Of course, if you don’t want to receive or want to receive less SMSes, appropriate controls are provided in your SMS Settings section.

Non-registered users can receive upto 5 SMSes per day. This should be great for sending those “how you doing mom?” messages (you know moms don’t sign up very easily).

Comment from mobile

Now you can also comment on any SMS that you receive from your friend from your mobile phone the moment you receive it.

Here’s the format: Send c username your comment to 99015 54321

e.g. To comment on kowboy’s latest sms, I’ll send c kowboy i like ur sms to 99015 54321

Simplified Mobile Commands

To post an SMS now you can just send it to our 10 digit non-premium number: 99015 54321 (without adding ‘p’ to it).

Earlier, to post: p i love vakow to 99015 54321
Now, to post: i love vakow to 99015 54321

Also, instead of “Subscribe/Sub”, we’ll be using “Follow”, which has become a sort of worldwide acceptable term for the action.

For other mobile commands, please have a look at the mobile cheat sheet.

PS: All previous mobile commands will continue to work as well.

And, we have made a bunch of design and usability improvements that we sincerely hope you’ll notice and appreciate.

Like always, our email line is open to you, please please please do write to us at feedback at vakow dot com with your feedback, suggestions, queries and complaints.

Have fun!

We sent out our very first newsletter to our users and made some gross mistakes.

• The links to our website are not working in the mail. We did not test the rich text editor properly and it somehow replaced everything “www.vakow.com” with “..”.
  Won’t help much but here are the links:
  News: http://www.vakow.com/news/
  Invite: http://www.vakow.com/invite/
• The mail came from “News” and people almost marked it “Spam”. Next time it will come from me.

What can I say. You learn.

Simply, it has the mass-appeal which is seen only in things like Cricket, Bollywood or Amitabh Bachchan in India. All age groups, all income groups in all cities and towns in India are forwarding these Jokes, quotes, greetings etc. to their friends and relatives. SMS Forwarding is a way to connect with their friends and also a source of entertainment.

We feel that Youtubes and Flickrs of the world can not be communities (not yet) where majority of Indians will flock online. India doesn’t have high broadband penetration, people don’t have fancy digicams, GPRS users are few and far between (though rising) and even today a lot of Internet surfing is done from cybercafes.

We realized that we needed a community that all Indians can relate to, a community that can provide content with the connectivity and reliability of SMSes, along with a rich and fun experience that Internet on a big screen can provide.

And that is just a bit of the immense thought process and deep market research that has gone behind Vakow! I’m serious.

PS 1: Now that the day zero hysteria is over and people have had their iced teas and teachers and have woken up in the morning to realize that users have continued to grow steadily, it’s time to get to work.

PS 2: Hearty thanks to Ashish S (who called us a Cool SMS Forward engine) and Ashish S (who thinks that we have mass appeal and reflect good thinking) for their awesome blog entries.