Today at work, I was stuck with the day shift. Since I also closed the shop last night, I was operating on even less sleep than is normal for the highly-unnatural-for-me nine-thirty a.m. start time, which is never much to begin with.
So, in my semi-zombified state, I was pleasantly surprised to learn something new and seemingly quite useful when a former co-worker who now works at the Verizon store in the Lloyd Mall stopped in for a sandwich on his lunch break. Since I’ve recently learned some Flash for MFDZ (check out the new in-browser play buttons for the streaming audio of every track), I was asking him some things about text and graphical web browsers on cell phones imagining what I could develop to make Music For Dozens content available on them (this may be somewhat jumping the gun when we have, basically, no customers that aren’t also parents of our artists, but it never hurts to be prepared, right?).
In the course of the conversation, Jobie showed me something really interesting: you can text message Google with a search query and they’ll text you back with the results. Google calls the service Short Message Service (SMS) and the number for it is 46645 (“GOOGL on most phones,” according to their website). Normally I would see this kind of service as another example of a technology looking for an application — text messaging, in this case, which I’ve only ever used as a novelty to zatz someone I was already most likely sitting next to — but Jobie, who spends his days selling people cell phone extras like text messaging packages, had a pretty airtight reason for its usefulness: the cost relative to 411 Connect calls. Verizon charges $2.99/mo. for 100 text messages. 411 Connect calls, on the other hand, cost $1.25 each. Looking at the bill that came today, this past month, I used exactly 2 of my available 100 text messages. That leaves 98 text messages that could have been used for 411 Connect calls, or $122.50 worth of 411 Connect functionality for $2.99. I actually made four 411 Connect calls for a total of five dollars, or about a seventh of my total bill. Which now feels like a lot for a function I could have accomplished with features I was already paying for.
It seems with this kind of economic logic (along with the cache that comes from its position in the storied Google Labs), Google SMS would be much more talked about than it is. Granted it doesn’t connect the call for you, but as a trade off, it’s much more flexible: giving you a larger number of results on broader search terms if you want them (all the results for “pizza 97214,” for example). Anyway, never having previously been a person who wanted his phone to do anything other than make phone calla, I could feel another side effect watching Jobie demonstrate this feature: I could see it acting as a gateway drug to getting comfortable with text interfaces for web data on the phone and therefore leading into using it to check email and read news headlines, and check RSS feeds, and . . . suddenly this simple thing in my pocket feels a lot like a platform.
Tagged: Google, SMS, Short Message Service, text messaging, cell phone, Verizon, mobile