1 Introduction

DOTGO is a brand new way to send and receive information to and from any individual, company, or organization with an internet domain name by cell-phone text messaging. To use DOTGO, just send a text message starting with an internet domain name to the phone number DOTCOM (368266)--or to one of the phone numbers DOTEDU (368338), DOTGOV (368468), DOTNET (368638), or DOTORG (368674) as appropriate. Try it now on your mobile phone in three simple steps:

Compose a new text message to the phone number 368266, which spells out "D-O-T-C-O-M" on most mobile-phone keypads.
Type the internet domain name "cnn" as the body of the message.
Send the message. You should receive a response within a few seconds.

In this case, the response is a list of news topics from cnn.com. Reply with the text message "1" to select the first topic, "Top Stories." You should again receive a response within a few seconds--in this case, a list of stories within "Top Stories" from cnn.com. Now reply again with the text message "1" to select the first story, "2" to select the second story, etc.

As another example, text "nytimes" to the phone number DOTCOM (368266). In this case, the response is a list of news stories from nytimes.com. You can reply to browse the stories as in the previous example.

Many services also accept additional input, allowing you to specify exactly what information you are seeking. For example, text "wikipedia dog" to the phone number DOTORG (368674) to learn about dogs from wikipedia.org. Or text "weather" + your zip code to the phone number DOTCOM (368266) to get the latest weather forecast for your area from weather.com. Or text "ezipsky" + your zip code + something in the night sky (like the name of a planet, star, or constellation) to the phone number DOTCOM (368266) to get up-to-the-minute instruction on how to see a celestial object from ezipsky.com. (This one works best at night!) Try a few of these examples now.

By now it is probably clear how DOTGO works: the first word of your message specifies the internet domain name, and the phone number specifies the top-level domain. So does this mean that DOTGO is simply the internet running over cell-phone text messaging? Well, not exactly. Certainly DOTGO replicates the organizational structure of the internet. That makes it easy for you to find what you are looking for. Looking for weather.com? Find it by texting "weather" to the phone number DOTCOM (368266). Looking for wikipedia.org? Find it by texting "wikipedia" to the phone number DOTORG (368674). But the information offered by DOTGO is generally a subset of the information available on the internet--the subset that is most useful and relevant in a mobile setting. Text messages are short, and DOTGO is designed to make it easy--and fast--to send and receive small amounts of information (say one or a few text messages worth) using a mobile phone. It is perhaps most useful to think of DOTGO as an extension of the internet to cell-phone text messaging.

This document provides a brief introduction to DOTGO from the perspective of a publisher seeking to implement a mobile service.