The ekit Travel Journal is a great way to share your trip but it’s even better to be able to hear from friends and family while you’re travelling. Friends and family have been able to leave comments in your journal, but you might not see them if you don’t visit the web site. To help travellers better stay in touch with friends and family we have introduced some new features.
- You can now receive SMS notifications on your phone when someone leaves a comment. The text message will contain the first 120 characters of the comment and if it’s longer you can go to the web site to see the rest.
- friends and family can send you public or private messages. Private messages are just sent as an SMS to your phone. Public messages are added to your Message Stream where your friends and family can see them and a notification is sent to your phone.
- Your journal now has a Message Stream which contains messages you have sent, messages you have received, and comments. You can see all the messages, but friends and family can only see public messages and comments.
- You can reply to message and comment notifications from your phone and the reply is added to your Message stream.
The Messages page is an activity stream (a bit like the news feed in facebook) which shows messages and comments in date order. So if someone adds a comment to one of your entries, even if the entry was made two weeks ago, it will appear at the top of the message list. This makes it easier for you to see recent comments and messages and reply to them.
When a you receive a notification of a comment or public message, the SMS is sent from a number like +6001. You can reply to the SMS and, when we receive it, we link it to the associated comment or message. In other words, a friend comments on your journal, you receive an SMS with a snippet of the comment, and when you reply it is added as another comment on that journal entry. How easy is that?
