Mobile takes easy info to the crowd
The Wikipedia phenomenon has spread to mobile with the rise of mobile SMS dictionaries – some credible and some not so credible. Perhaps taking everything to the crowd is not always wise. Cellphedia is a mobile dictionary service that allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, using SMS text messaging on cell phones.
According to E-Commerce Times, members can register for free on the site and indicate their subject of interest. When a user asks a question it is sent to all the members who expressed interest in this particular subject. The first answer received is sent back to you, regardless of its accuracy. Both questions and answers are sent and received using SMS on your mobile phone. There is no community review to assess their accuracy and group editing is apparently the next priority for the service, according to Limor Garcia, the creator of the service.
The emphasis, and this is important for developers working on mobile applications, is the social context. As Garcia explains, “it is all about interaction between the people, not a database.” We are not quite sure how this will work out when it is meant to be an encyclopaedia. The important thing here for developers is not so much the current usage of the application but potential uses. Messaging is no longer just a stand-alone function.
Two-way messaging applications have opened up new arenas for mobile application developers. Two-way text messaging uses both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technology in order to quickly respond to users queries or to send confirmation or log-in messages. This means that users can be connected wherever they are and whenever they want. This freedom of movement is made possible by SMS messaging API’s (application programming interfaces) that allow for easy and quick communication between a variety of communication devices such as email to SMS (SMTP API) or the uploading to a central server of bulk messages (FTTP API) that are then sent to the bulk list of mobile numbers.
This automated two-way messaging system has a variety of useful applications across a wide range of industries from customer service options to something like the mobile dictionary. The differentiation in the usefulness of the application is going to be the level of sophistication with which it can discriminate with the message that it sends. Cellphedia is a rather crude example of a two-way mobile content application but it opens the door to other avenues for mobile application developers to explore.
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