The service allows its users to send up to three messages for free every day, or up to 90 a month, and receive replies at their Lycos inbox. Virgin Mobile, which has put its logo on the site, is currently promoting the cost of 3p text messages sent to other customers of its network within the UK.
From mid June for six weeks, Virgin will re-skin Lycos' SMS composer with images retaining the spirit of the off-line campaign, which is currently running on TV, cinema, radio and press.
Alex Kovach, Lycos UK managing director, said: "With this campaign, we can offer Virgin Mobile a large community of users who are interested in mobile services and who use Lycos every day to send free SMS."
Launched in November 1999 as a joint venture between Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile (then One 2 One), Virgin Mobile has 2.6m customers. It is the UK's first virtual network, using T-Mobile's network capacity and Virgin's record stores to sell phones and airtime.
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