If you are a company or an advanced user, you may be interested in writing scripts to automatize repetitive messaging tasks or even in integrating fastDove into your applications. Here are some examples of what you might want to do:

• Modify an internal application to send weekly reports to the responsible people.
• Send customers a SMS message when they sign up on your website.
• Hook fastDove into your servers so they can notify a system administrator when there is a problem, or even when updates are available.
• Or really, anything else you’d like to use messaging for!

For this, we expose a powerful API from which you can access almost all of fastDove’s features. This REST API is available over simple HTTP and supports either XML or JSON (at your option) as communication formats. See the documentation at http://api.fastdove.com/1/ for more information.

Using our API from Python

Even further, since at fastDove we like to make things as simple as possible, we’re happy to provide you with a Python module which will make it even easier to access our features.

Python is a powerful dynamic programming language used in a wide variety of application domains by companies all over the world. If you don’t use Python, don’t worry, since you can still use our API directly from almost any other programming language (including C/C++, PHP, Java, Ruby, etc).

This Python module, which is provided on a best effort basis, is available at http://static.fastdove.com/api/fastdoveapi.py. Using it can be as easy as:

from fastdoveapi import *
fastdove = FastDove('username', 'password')
person = Contact(mobile='+34644xxxxxx')
fastdove.send_message('Hello, how are you?', person)

We get a lot of questions from our users, wondering how their friends will know who is sending them the messages. Other services out there let you send SMS´s from your computer but don’t support user id. We do! This means when you send a message with fastDove, your friends will know it’s you sending them the message; provided that person has you in their phones contact list of course. That’s why we ask for your phone number when you register!

But we decided we wanted to take this a step further and also allow our users to own their own unique user id. This is ideal for businesses who want to send messages which don’t require a reply and want to ensure that the person receiving the message knows exactly who is sending it.

This feature combined with groups and message scheduling – we believe can empower your short communications like never before. Notify your blog followers of new posts. Grow your personal brand using your twitter name when sending SMS.

Sign up at fastDove and request your very own user id in the settings panel.

Back in 2009 when we founded fastDove, we realized the importance that mobile phones held in our everyday lives. Developing software that would increase the utility of mobile devices was our goal from day one. Very soon after starting out we came across an article in Reuters, titled – “People would rather lose wallet than cell phone”. There are several reasons why this can be the case, but one of the more important is that losing your phone often means losing the numbers of those most important in your life. Resulting in the horrible task of trying to recuperate these numbers by any means possible.  We don’t think this is good enough so we have developed several ways for you to keep your contacts safe and at the same time increasing the usability of fastDove.

Mobile

If you own one of the above mobiles and our fastDove app you are one step away from backing up your contact safely on our web. So that in the case your phone does go MIA you can simply install our app on your new phone and after signing in with your existing account, recovering all you numbers.

Once your numbers are backed up, sending messages though your phone and on the web will be even faster. Allowing you to quickly select friend and groups as you type.

Here at fastDove we think it’s important that you know when your messages have been delivered. Having this information on the delivery status of your massages allows you rest assure that your messages have been delivered, allowing you to get on with business. We use fastDove to communicate among the team every day, so we developed the following icons so we know that important messages get delivered; even when we are out of the country!

After listening to feedback from our users (you guys) we know how important this functionally is to you. Therefore we also worked it into our new mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry & Android). How we display these delivery icons vary a little depending on which platform you use; so we have decided to put together a short guide for each mobile device.

Sending group messages is another feature we developed here at fastDove. Traditionally sending group messages could get messy. But with our delivery status you can also get real-time information on the status of your group messages.

Hey!

After some last minute problems, we finally are proud of releasing fastDove 0.9.1 ! Don’t expect so many changes (we are preparing big things for the next release) but here are some of the current version improvements:

• completely revised translations into Spanish and Catalan.
• really powerful importer from Highrise, Soocial (to sync with your handset), Excel and CSV.
• send sms uploading an Excel file with numbers and messages.
• improved reception to new mobile operators such as Simyo and Yoigo.
• minor API fixes.
• and lots of minor bug fixes thanks to all the great people who are helping us improving our service day by day!