I have tested Zong for one of the blog I am running and I ran into a very unpleasant experience. Zong is a SMS gateway (what is Zong ?) provided by Echovox (based in Geneva) that lets you create your own mobile service for your blog. One of them is an alert system based on the RSS feed (called Z-feed) which seems to be a very good idea (we had worked out something similar at Kaywa for our own blogs). I thought I would give it a try to see how it works and even though I have my ideas for improvement (maybe I’ll come back later on that) it worked fine with my first test: I published something on the blog and a little while afterwards I get a SMS with the title and the content of the post (up to 160 characters of course). Worked fine for the first test but the decond one was a total disaster… I published a post on the blog and after a while I checked my mobile and I get over 40 SMS alerting me of a new post with the very same content. I had to immediately unsubscribe to the alert service as I was still getting SMS. Now this is for me a CHF 10.- experience (CHF 0.20 per SMS) I am not very keen about (not sure how I am going to deal with that yet) but I am glad I tested it before advertising it on the blog. It would be really a pain to deal with the community complaining about all those unwanted SMS they would be charged for.
Too bad the service is not mature. There is nice things to do there… I had already in mind my little RSS hacks to improve the service :-)