On the off chance your cell phone is of the decidedly dumb variety, Mountain View’s engineers have worked out an alternative solution to keep your Google + circles intersecting. Initially available only for the U.S. and Indian markets at the time of the social service’s launch , the search giant’s expanding the reach of its SMS feature to over 41 additional countries, giving users the option to post updates, as well as receive and reply to notifications via text.
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Google+ expands SMS support to over 41 countries, lets you stay social over text
The folks at Zipwhip may have unwittingly discovered a new business model. 
Given how much the world has already noticed that instant messaging can be cheaper than SMS, it’s surprising to see the founder of WhatsApp trying to persuade carriers that he’s actually doing them a favor. In an interview with Reuters , Brian Acton said that his messaging service is “facilitating a broad movement to data plans,” from which carriers “stand to benefit quite substantially.” While it’s certainly true that smartphones and data plans make nice margins for operators, Acton’s thesis also slithers around some slightly inconvenient evidence . According to analysts at Ovum, carriers lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenues last year, and are set to lose another $23 billion this year
Let’s imagine you’re both fortunate enough to have nine friends and you want to take them all out to dinner… tonight ! So you send them all an invitation message, but the restaurant you’ve picked offends half of them for some reason. You suggest something else, and the other half object, making it a drawn-out and painful process
As customers of Sprint’s contract-averse MVNO have probably noticed, Virgin Mobile has been having a national outage of its text and data services for at least several hours now. While we’re hearing from some customers it’s been out all day, acknowledgement of the disruption only just became Facebook official. 
A new version of Google Voice has just crawled out of the woodwork, and while the changes are minor, we think most users will like what’s in store. 
Microsoft has found the root cause behind the SMS vulnerability in its Windows Phone operating system. 
