Are you okay?
Back during 9/11, New York's phone system was crippled, so I had only sporadic access to the Internet; I could get online for a few minutes, but would often get bumped off. To quickly let my Canadian friends know I was alive, I sent an email to one well-connected friend in Toronto and asked him to forward to everyone I knew up there. These days, texting is an even faster way to let loved ones know you haven't been killed in a recent terrorist attack. But it has the same one-to-many problem: In a crisis, it's too laborious to to send message to dozens of people.
Thus was born the idea for textOK, a new service in Britain that works like this: You sign up at the textOK web site and input a big list of every phone number you'd like to contact in an emergency. When the next car bomb goes off in downtown London, you just send an SMS to textOK's number -- 60999 -- and the service will bulk-blast a message to your posse telling them you're still alive. It costs 25p, which apparently will be donated to charity.
Perhaps most intriguingly, textOK argues that their service has positive network effects:
Keeps the phone network alive -- lots of people sending 1 text message through us instead of making phone calls will drastically reduce the amount of network traffic.
(Thanks to Engadget for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at August 14, 2005 04:09 PM
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Surely it's only a matter of time before phones come with this kind of mailing list feature built in (if they don't allready). Also, won't more messages be actually sent? If you were sending to 20 people, that would normally be 20 text messages. Under this system you send one message to the textOK people and then they send 20 text messages, so that's 21 messages. I don't really know how text messaging works though so I'm probably wrong.
Posted by: tomp at August 15, 2005 4:01 AM
I dislike this idea immensely - SMS is not, and never has been, designed as a 'reliable' system. Your message can disappear silently anywhere between source and destination. What's better? Contacting someone and letting them know, and knowing, or hoping?
I know I'm not the only one who has had messages disappear.
Posted by: Achromatic1978 at August 15, 2005 7:20 AM
tomp, that's undoubtedly right -- I'm sure this has gotta be a built-in feature pretty soon. As for the question of network activity: Yeah, I'm not 100% clear on how SMS works, so I'm not sure how it'd save network activity either.
Achromatic -- yeah, SMS reliability is very low compared to email. I think something like 1 in 10 SMS messages vanishes without arriving.
Posted by: Clive at August 15, 2005 10:25 AM
I know sms works on cycles here, of six I think, so your text is sent six times a minute for the first six minutes, then every six minutes, then six times an hour, then hourly, until it gets through, or is lost.
And generally, I find text a really reliable way of communication, as long as the person is within range. I also think an old phone of mine, a Nokia, allowed group messages, but you could only preset a couple.
Posted by: jenpot at August 16, 2005 5:37 PM
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Surely it's only a matter of time before phones come with this kind of mailing list feature built in (if they don't allready). Also, won't more messages be actually sent? If you were sending to 20 people, that would normally be 20 text messages. Under this system you send one message to the textOK people and then they send 20 text messages, so that's 21 messages. I don't really know how text messaging works though so I'm probably wrong.
Posted by: tomp![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 15, 2005 4:01 AM
I dislike this idea immensely - SMS is not, and never has been, designed as a 'reliable' system. Your message can disappear silently anywhere between source and destination. What's better? Contacting someone and letting them know, and knowing, or hoping?
I know I'm not the only one who has had messages disappear.
Posted by: Achromatic1978![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 15, 2005 7:20 AM
tomp, that's undoubtedly right -- I'm sure this has gotta be a built-in feature pretty soon. As for the question of network activity: Yeah, I'm not 100% clear on how SMS works, so I'm not sure how it'd save network activity either.
Achromatic -- yeah, SMS reliability is very low compared to email. I think something like 1 in 10 SMS messages vanishes without arriving.
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 15, 2005 10:25 AM
I know sms works on cycles here, of six I think, so your text is sent six times a minute for the first six minutes, then every six minutes, then six times an hour, then hourly, until it gets through, or is lost.
And generally, I find text a really reliable way of communication, as long as the person is within range. I also think an old phone of mine, a Nokia, allowed group messages, but you could only preset a couple.
Posted by: jenpot![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 16, 2005 5:37 PM