Back in November, I posted about seeing a couple of small restaurants touting their SMS shortcode offers, and wondered if the trend was really taking hold here in the US. I’ve now noticed that the paper here in town, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has launched its own text alert service.

Again, not a major milestone in worldwide mobile services, but it seems like further evidence that this stuff is really starting to take off in the US. Despite the glitz and its population (somewhere over 2 million people in the metro area), Vegas is a fairly provincial place. And if you check out the RJ’s web site, you won’t get the impression that they’re really on top of this whole internet and technology thing. (As an aside, it’s sort of amusing that the other paper in town, the Sun, has a really great new site… but terrible content, whereas the RJ’s content is — slightly — better, but their site makes it damn near impossible to read.)

Now, the service itself: I like the shortcode, 702411 (702 being the Las Vegas area code). The content isn’t very compelling yet, and hopefully that will change — if people sign up to these sorts of services for the first time, and find them useless, it will create a strong, and damning, first impression.