Jason talks about efficient ping technology to either replace or compliment the current text madness. With one click of a button you’ll be able to send your message across without disrupting the target person too much.

Here’s a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to “ping” someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.

I don’t favor text-messaging much, so this might come in handy if some sort of a global standard is implemented. Another good life example:

Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs gives a good example of text messaging being used for this. He talked about kids in Sweden after a party. Say you’ve seen someone you quite liked and you’d like to see them again, but don’t know if the feeling’s shared. You’d send them a blank text message, or maybe just a really bland one like “hey, good party”. If they reply, ask for a date. The first message is almost entirely expressive communication: tentative, deniable.

So why call it sweehearting?

Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”…in the absence of a prearraged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.

I like this, but while waiting for cellphone companies to start implementing the idea I might start my own list of codes and spread them within my circle to help me send split-second messages. Something like:

01 - Where the fuck are you?
02 - I miss you.
03 - I’m sick.
04 - I’m sorry.
05 - I’m stuck in traffic.

Et Cetera…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 9:09pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.