• 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)

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.

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.

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.

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!