MUMBAI, INDIA: Communication and socializing are two major needs of the human race since time immemorial. And at every stage of development he develops new methods to communicate and socialize.

From telephone to wireless to Internet to mobile phone, every single day the regime of communication witnesses some kind of an advancement, bringing geographies closer and closer in a virtual space.

These technologies have virtually killed the distance, offering quick interactive means and constant one-to-one and one-to-many communication channels.

In fact, mobile communication has become more content rich using tools of SMS (short messaging service), MMS (multimedia messaging service) and voice mails.

On the Internet front and Web technologies, it is the flavor of instantness with emails, instant messaging, blogs, twitters and the highly popular socializing sites.

In an bid to bring mobile communication and socializing experience together, Webaroo Technologies have launched SMS GupShupm, a mobile group SMS service that allows users to create mobile communities and broadcast messages to them. Interestingly, the company offers this service free of cost to users.

According to Webaroo's CEO, Beerud Sheth, SMS communication is the foundation of all human activity and therefore, new communication tools such as Internet and mobile will naturally have broad impact on all aspects of human life.

"Now, it's easy to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime for free (or cheaply). It makes the world feel smaller and faster," says Sheth.

SMS GupShup service focuses on human aspects and social needs. It's built on the premise of mobile communication and the Web platform of social networking that is gaining wider acceptance today.

On this Seth points that better communication also leads to greater socialization. "Now it's easy to reconnect with long-lost friends, or never lose them in the first place. Social tools make it easy to form new relationships and maintain them forever."

He comments that it's just as easy to communicate with one or 1 million people (as illustrated by SMS GupShup), which makes for a better connected world, a more social place.

According to Webaroo Technologies' CTO, Viswanath Ramachandran, the design philosophy for this unique service is to creat simple product for the customers' use.

"Though there's a Web component to this service, it is not essential to use the Web for our SMS service. Normally, for a person to interact with any social networking sites, he needs a computer (or a smartphone) with Internet access and then need to sign in with it," says Ramachandran.

"But with SMS GupShup, what you need is only a cell phone that supports SMS. Once the person creates a group or community and SMS it to short code 567678 along with mobile numbers of friends and relatives, the service will broadcast the message to those contacts freely," he explains.

It works directly from the cell phones without downloading any application.Technically, the SMS service uses Jave centric technologies backed by Linux servers and standard Linux hardware. The nature of SMS GupShup App (applications) is similar to those of large social networking applications used by Facebook and Orkut.

The company has over 100 servers which are linked with multiple operators for offers services across India and has about 15 million registered users.

Since the content here is user generated, there's a constant monitoring on the messages exchanged by the users. Ramachandran says that all the groups or communities created by users are default in public domain, "so certain abusive words are banned or censored and explicit messages are rejected".

While discussing the revenue model of the company, he said that it generates revenues by offering messaging solutions and services targeted to enterprises and marketing content for advertisers.