What about Texting
Everyone’s been talking about Podcasting and Vi/Vodasting so much (especially with Google’s recent $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube) that I think a lot of people are forgetting about other emerging communication mediums and how to start using them in our everyday lives.
Podcasting and vicasting is still young and the biggest hurdle these technologies have isn’t going to be making tools easier to use - it’s getting people to have something meaningful to say and encouraging them to do it in such a way that others will actually want to see or listen to them.
With the number one fear being public speaking (according to Seinfeld), it’ll be interesting to see how close podcast or vicasts creation will actually get to the family living room.
Another area that is quickly growing is text messaging. It’s one of those mediums that people seem to take for granted and the media doesn’t get all that excited about (at least so far). What seems to be fascinating to me is the current growth with this medium and some of the new ideas being brought to an old concept of texting.
Twitter is a new company that snuck out of a few guys working at ODEO (a podcasting website). Twitter’s whole concept is being a community of live updates from around the world — all of them answers to one simple question: What are you doing? This is great for quickly blasting a question to a group of friends to see if they want to see a midnight showing of Man of the Year.
Dodgeball
Of course Twitter’s concept isn’t terribly new - Dodgeball (recently acquired by Google) did something close to this years ago. I remember using it in Austin, Texas last year while at SXSW trying to catch up with people I had just met earlier that day. It was a great tool (still is) but the learning curve felt a bit steep. I did catch on a bit quicker after I bumped into the main developer of Dodgeball at a bar, but not everyone gets that opportunity.
Google SMS
The other one playing in this field is Google with their “Quick results” using SMS. I came across this a few weeks ago but didn’t pay much attention until I was hanging out with a group of friends and we didn’t know what time a movie started. Google SMS makes is easy to text a message (the departed 49423) to 46645 and get a quick listing of times. Not only that but a lot of other things are literally at your fingertips.
NowNow
Of course Amazon is jumping on this with NowNow. NowNow is a service that mobile users can use to find answers to any question via mobile email. It’s a good idea but it’s a bit frustrating that it’s not an immediate response. Amazon is planning on paying users who will search the web on your behalf.
IOHU Money
Others are allowing people to be notified of things via text message instead of an email. As long as they keep the message extremely short (something like: “We’re Live now at www.site.com”) it hopefully won’t be annoying.
As you can see - texting is starting to pick up and I’ve only pointed out a few people that are providing good ideas. I expect to see quite a bit of movement in this area over the next year.
For me personally - I have a few ideas that I’d like to try hacking away at. I see a few of my (slowly being developed) apps adopting simple SMS capabilities - that is once we finish with the main development.
Bill Says:
Suh-Weet! I never saw that mobile answers for looking up showtimes! That’s great!