Now that I’m look­ing for inno­v­a­tive uses of SMS, I see them every­where -- even on yogurt con­tain­ers. This recent Stonyfield Farm lid sug­gested I send a text mes­sage to get climate-related infor­ma­tion on a com­pany, so I did:

SENT TO 30644: cc stony­field farm

RECEIVED REPLY: Climate Counts has ranked STONYFIELD FARM 2nd out of 11 Food Products com­pa­nies. UNILEVER leads this sec­tor. Learn how to change the world at http://climatecounts.org. To get action alerts & let com­pa­nies know cli­mate change mat­ters to you (up to 6 msg/month), reply ACTION

Getting a min­i­mal read­out on a company’s envi­ron­men­tal behav­ior via SMS is a nov­elty, but not that use­ful. For that rea­son, I don’t think we’ll sud­denly see shop­pers tex­ting as they stroll the aisles. The power of brand­ing is too strong and our eco­log­i­cal sen­si­tiv­ity is too weak. An SMS will not help any­one decide between Coke and Pepsi, and I’m not buy­ing a Toshiba lap­top over an Apple, despite Apple’s rel­a­tively poor envi­ron­men­tal record (sorry), because there are too many other fac­tors at play.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an SMS-based ser­vice pro­moted on a yogurt con­tainer. Can you imag­ine see­ing that only a few years ago? I wouldn’t have known what to make of it.

Last week, the New York Times reported that New York City has sub­poe­naed the cre­ator of TxtMob, a web- and SMS-based ser­vice that helped facil­i­tate pro­tes­tor com­mu­ni­ca­tions dur­ing the 2004 Republican National Convention. From the story:

The sub­poena, which was issued Feb. 4, instructed Mr. Hirsch, who is com­plet­ing his dis­ser­ta­tion at M.I.T., to pro­duce a wide range of mate­r­ial, includ­ing all text mes­sages sent via TXTmob dur­ing the con­ven­tion, the date and time of the mes­sages, infor­ma­tion about peo­ple who sent and received mes­sages, and lists of peo­ple who used the service.

The good news is that Tad Hirsch, TxtMob’s cre­ator, is refus­ing to turn over any records, at least for now. The bad news is that this sub­poena hap­pened at all, adding SMS logs to the list of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions that gov­ern­ments want to get their hands on, next to emails, web brows­ing his­to­ries and tele­phone calls.

Another unre­lated yet awe­some thing that Hirsch has done is to make the source code open and free. Maybe I could use this to power a future project…

Source: City Subpoenas Creator of Text Messaging Code

A cou­ple weeks ago, my research into SMS as an inter­ac­tive medium led me to a friend of a friend who hap­pens to be named Brian House. Brian gra­ciously agreed to talk with me on the phone, and our con­ver­sa­tion val­i­dated a num­ber of ideas I had about SMS.

Brian’s most well-known project is called Yellow Arrow. Done in 2004, the project involved dis­trib­ut­ing thou­sands of yel­low arrow stick­ers, on each of which was printed a unique code. These stick­ers were sent all over the globe, where user-participants could stick them on sur­faces, point­ing to things of note. Then, by send­ing a text mes­sage with the arrow’s unique ID, the par­tic­i­pant would “reg­is­ter” a “mem­ory” or story about that place or object, such as “this is where we first kissed” or “this is the best chi­nese food in town.” Subsequent vis­i­tors can send in the same text code and will receive back the orig­i­nal story. Yellow Arrow was fea­tured in the recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA.

The real thing I wanted to talk to Brian about, though, was TXTML, a sys­tem he built as part of his Master’s the­sis that can be used to cre­ate “inter­ac­tive text-messaging appli­ca­tions.” I’m look­ing into doing some projects with SMS, and will be eval­u­at­ing TXTML for whether or not it would be a good tool for what I want to do. In short, it sounds like TXTML is great for cre­at­ing indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences and nar­ra­tives. Since it’s smarter than typ­i­cal SMS engines, it can remem­ber each user’s his­tory, and custom-tailor the inter­ac­tion for each indi­vid­ual. (For exam­ple, you text “I am Scott,” and it responds “Hello, Scott, I remem­ber that you like the color blue.”) It may not be suited to medi­at­ing the group expe­ri­ences that I want to design, but I can cer­tainly learn a lot just by work­ing with it.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that yesterday’s 5-years-in-Iraq protest was well-orchestrated, in part thanks to fre­quent updates deliv­ered to par­tic­i­pants via text mes­sages. C.W. Nevius reports:

I was told to sim­ply text mes­sage the “DASW [Direct Action to Stop the War] text mob” to get up-to-the-minute mes­sages describ­ing the lat­est action sent to my cell phone. At 3:08:29 p.m., for exam­ple, I received a mes­sage that said, “DASW cur­rent esti­mate - 150 arrests - thanks for tak­ing to the streets and join­ing in.”

This is the first time I’ve heard of a small, local activist group (Bay Area DASW) employ­ing SMS to help keep their par­tic­i­pants in the loop. It’s a great idea, and could shift the dynamic of other direct actions in the future. Protests can be intense and a lit­tle scary when you see hordes of activists run­ning up against walls of police -- “What’s going on down there?” “Is every­one okay?” Panic breaks out when indi­vid­u­als can’t see over the crowd to get the big­ger pic­ture. “Are we safe here?” “Should we keep march­ing, or turn back?” A cen­tral­ized orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee, armed with binoc­u­lars and mobiles, can now mon­i­tor the protest sta­tus among them­selves, send­ing only per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion about the big pic­ture to par­tic­i­pants, such as num­ber of arrests, or “look out, tear gas deployed, head SW on Market.”

A great arti­cle, and a great head­line, from Sunday’s New York Times: “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)”. One high­light from the piece:

“Texting is in between call­ing and send­ing and e-mail,” he explained while tak­ing a break from study hall. Now he won’t even con­sider writ­ing a let­ter to his mother, Jan. “It’s too time consuming,” he said. “You have to go to the post office. Instead, I can sit and watch tele­vi­sion and send a text, which is the same thing.”

Ummm… no. That’s not the same thing at all. If writ­ing a let­ter were the same as writ­ing an SMS, then you wouldn’t always choose SMS.

Semantics aside, it’s scary to think about how SMS and other, sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies are already mutat­ing our meth­ods for inter­per­sonal inter­ac­tion. As the author points out in the arti­cle, the tele­phone was sim­i­larly (if not more) dis­rup­tive, but of course, to me, the land­line tele­phone is “nor­mal,” because I grew up with it. So the prover­bial kids today are grow­ing up with email, IM, VOIP, and SMS, and all of those com­mu­ni­ca­tions media are, to them, just “normal.”