It\’s a little ridiculous. The big phone companies want to charge you how much per month just to send texts to each other. Those texts probably cost them about 1 cent…per 1 million texts! You get the feeling it\’s one of those deals where they\’ll squeeze you for that amount as long as they\’re able to. Yes, there\’s free texting apps out there and they\’re okay (except for the obnoxious ads you have to put up with) but we\’re going a step further towards free texting with the added advantage of local news and local gossip. In this day of added features, it\’s feels a little chintzy just giving you free text through an app. Let\’s look at how to use the Zipper for free text needs on top of your local news and gossip.

It\’s actually pretty simple. When you bring up the Zipper local news app, you can go in and create a private channel right away. This channel can be password protected or open depending on how you set it up. You can always change this status later on if you like. You can have as many channels as you like on top of the default ones that are given such as traffic, news, gossip, etc. Let\’s take an example. Let\’s say you have a crew that you run around with…another 4-5 people that drive your parents crazy for an example. You quickly set up the channel for the crew. Maybe you give it a alpha numeric login to protect your communication from eavesdropping siblings, parents, and x\’s. That\’s up to you. You give the password to your friends (the \”Crew\”) and the name of the channel. They can quickly scan through the local channels or search for yours. They can even just enter the password and the channel will pop right up if it\’s local. Now, the crew has it\’s very own mobile, messaging board with an ongoing history between the different members. It\’s such a pain to text one friend, and then another with the same instructions of \”I\’ll meet you at the beach around 4, dorks\”. Now, you just post it to your \”Crew\” channel and they all can check it out. As new messages come and go, you have an ongoing history and dialog available from your smart phones (as it should be). There are so many places this is useful.

Whether it\’s a business organizing an event, a group of friends meeting up on Friday, or a high school looking for the latest party updates once the first one is busted up, the Zipper and it\’s free texting boards are just waiting. Guess what else they\’re doing. They\’re not charging you money, that\’s for sure. It\’s all free. The app itself is even free. It\’s ridiculous for you to pay so much each month to the big phone companies when you we offer you not only texting but message boarding or \’mexting\’ as we like to put it (we know, not very original but we\’re going with it). It\’s all free and it\’s all yours. Texting, private message boarding, local news, and local gossip at the touch of your thumbs through the Zipper app through Itunes or Droid. Or…you could pay the big phone company more money towards their gold toilet seats. Your call.

Author Bio: Dennis Jarvis writes extensively about local news and local gossip smart phone apps.