Vodafone takes text-based social networking to India

Partners with Myriad to launch web and messaging services over USSD and SMS to over 143m subscribers.

The services will run on Myriad’s platform, Xumii, which enables social networking on low-end phones, without requiring users to have a data plan.

Vodafone Essar will also roll out messaging services, including SMS, instant messaging and mobile email.

Despite the low-end nature of the roll-out, users will still be able to access rich in features such as viewing multiple messaging channels simultaneously in the same thread.

"Adoption of social networking on mobile devices across India is growing exponentially. In order to keep pace with market demands, our partnership with Myriad will enable us to quickly and seamlessly deliver social networking services on a massive scale across our entire subscriber base using SMS and USSD," said Kumar Ramanathan, CMO, Vodafone Essar.

Myriad is a mobile software specialist which shipped over 3.8 billion applications on more than 2.2 billion phones.