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Cellphedia, a SMS Social Network Service
Roland Piquepaille writes "Based on ideas taken from Wikipedia and dodgeball, Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, using SMS text messaging on cell phones. Here is how it works, according to "Cellphedia Melds Facts with Mobile Smart Mobs" from E-Commerce Times. First, you register for free on the site and you indicate your subjects of interest. If you want to ask a question, it is sent to all the members who expressed interest in this particular subject. Finally, the first answer received by Cellphedia is sent back to you. This means that later answers, which could have been more accurate, are discarded. But this service is still very young and its creator is working hard to improve it. Read more for some examples of questions and answers stored on the Cellphedia central server."
Based on ideas taken from Wikipedia and dodgeball , Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, using SMS text messaging on cell phones. Here is how it works, according to " Cellphedia Melds Facts with Mobile Smart Mobs " from E-Commerce Times. First, you register for free on the site and you indicate what are your subjects of interest. If you want to ask a question, it is sent to all the members who expressed interest in this particular subject. Finally, the first answer received by Cellphedia is sent back to you. This means that later answers, which could have been more accurate, are discarded. But this service is still very young and its creator is working hard to improve it. Read more...
Here is a general description of this service, created by Limor Garcia as part of her thesis while at New York University.
Questions and answers are sent and received using SMS on your cell phone. And as I wrote above, only the first answer received by CellPhedia is sent back to the person who asked a question.
Interviewed for this article, Howard Rheingold, from Smart Mobs , said that Cellphedia was another example of the convergence between technologies such as cell phone, computers and Internet.
Now, let's look at some examples of questions and answers stored on the Cellphedia central server. As you can see, there are all kinds of requests.
Q: age new pope
A: 78
Q: what's a phreak
A: a phreak is someone who is highly skilled in the use of phone systems. phreaksare considered a subset of hackers.
Q: does someone know how to install osx tiger on to an ipod for later installation on an ibook?
A: not possible
Q: where can i find info on time travel?
For another point of view about this service, you can read this article from Wired News, "
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network
Answers to questions, eh?
Such as, 'How does Roland Piquepaille sleep at night'?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Roland Piquepaille, go to hell!
You mean with his penis up timothy's ass? That could be uncomfortable I suppose.
Question: What is the mean temperature on Neptune.
Answer: $5.99. That is how much a trial sample of Viagrew will cost you for a limited time. Try now, risk free!
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
This message was immediately received by Cellphedia by SMS:
who iz rolex pickapal n y iz he on slashdot lol lmao
Do you like German cars?
suck .. this entire idea is a joke. Someone should be beaten repeatedly with the cluestick.
Ignoring the general hatred that seems to be around for Roland Piquepaille (DISCLAIMER: I have no opinion on the guy), is this something people would use?
Maybe I'm missing something, but in the time it takes to ask the question and get an answer through your cell phone, I would think that you could find a computer and Google the inquirey. What could you possibly ask of a cell phone encyclopedia that you couldn't find on the internet?
Wait! I don't think I want an answer to that.
Vol~
It's just like Wikipedia only with one-sentence articles with no punctuation, every query costs you arm and leg and reading with 2-point font makes you blind in the process. I expect it to be a great success. Cellphones are truly amazing.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
just make roland an editor so we can block his stories and get on with it.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
No, really... that's what it says.
With all the advances in KM over the years, maybe a more interesting approach would be to have the system aggregate/rate responses over a period of time and respond with the top 3 or so. As planned, I would think the system described is less than useful, it would be downright obnoxious once it hit critical mass (go read every first post on
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I see a massive potential for spam.
1. Setup a SMS bridge
2. Register for all topics of interest
3. write a script that replies almost instantly with "I hear that all the time, here is an in-depth article on my website" that points to whatever porn/free ipod/whatever spam site
4. profit!!!
bash: rtfm: command not found
If you use this, how do you have any assurance that the answers you get are actually accurate? Given the number of uninformed people walking around, not to mention people who think it's funny to hand out deliberate misinformation, wouldn't this be practically useless? And you can completely forget about any questions that would attract commercially motivated answers (e.g. Where is the nearest gas station?)
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
From the this-sounds-deeply-dumb dept ???
/. get for posting to this guys online journal ?
Is that what slashdot is pushing as News for Nerds these days ?
How much of a kickback does
Sad.
Why is it ALWAYS Timmy who posts the Roland infomercials?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Moderators, parent is nothing more but SPAM! Look carefully and you'll see that the link in "Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself" is NOT a direct link to www.blogads.com but a redirect from other domain to hide the fact that it points to a referer link to blogads! Read carefully and see that the poster actually promotes blogads saying how much anyone having a blog can earn and posts it on slashdot where many people want to earn money that way. Then the link is a paid link and the poster will get a percentage of money generated by all of us who sign up with that program after following that link. Briliant, isn't it? But it is SPAM and should be moderated as such. Instead this offtopic SPAM is moderated as Score:5! Moderators, are you blind or stupid? MOD IT DOWN!
the only reply that you ever get is "First Post!!!"
__
Given the number of uninformed people walking around, not to mention people who think it's funny to hand out deliberate misinformation, wouldn't this be practically useless?
I don't know where you got the idea that people think it's funny to hand out deliberate misinformation but this time you can rest assured that first of all every answer must be verified twice before it gets marked as "ok" and even then you as a reader have an option to rate it from 0 to 10 (where 0 means useless and 10 means very useful) which in turns gives a bonus to its author and makes it more likely to use this author's text in the future when many answers to the same questions are available. OK, I'm lying! Sue me!
children. As soon as you've got children who can easily get in touch with you, via SMS or other means, you'll find yourself fielding all sorts of stupid questions.
This cellpodiatry thing ought to be a great introduction for couples contemplating kids. With some experience they may change their minds.
Son, "Dad, the cars out of gas, what do I do."
Dad, "You walk to a gas station, borrow a can, buy some gas, walk back to the car, put it in, drive back to the gas station, return the can, and buy more gas. Don't forget to buy more gas. Now repeat back what I just told you"
Daughter, "Dad, Mick Jagger is in town and wants me to com eparty with him, is it OK?
Dad, "Call your mom"
Roland Piquepaille...Nothing to see here...move along...
Aye. Good catch. If i had points, i'd mod it down
as far as I can tell, http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/ is just a blog, and he is linking from auto-generated links made by the blog software.
now he does appear to have a couple text advertisement links on his blog to help pay hosting costs (maybe these links drive up his traffic and make him more money like he says about roland), but otherwise it seems rather innocent.
though it is fairly odd that he just doesn't directly link
I thought we were rid of this bozo.
I wonder which cell phone provider came up with this idea.
Some cell companies charge as much as $0.15 per SMS message.
If this thing catches on, they'll be rolling in cash (even more than they are now).
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Note carefully how it is spelled ess-one-eh-ess ...
Infuriate left and right
Note carefully how the sig refers to ess-one-eh-ess ...
Note carefully how you didn't realize what was going on and neither did bozo #1 who you responded to.
Infuriate left and right
Easy. I've already looked into it for myself.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
So, I'll take a test and just whip out my cell phone and send a question I'm having problem on to this service and get back an answer. Awesome!
...oh wait. This is Slashdot, right.
Seriously though, have you never been in a situation where you would have liked to know the answer to a question and *not* been near a computer?
At least "wikipedia" is a funky pigeon of Hawaiian and English, which is kinda natural for any combo with a Hawaiian word.
But cellphedia sounds more like a social disease than a social network. They need a new name.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
for all the reasons noted elsewhere, this probably isn't going anywhere.
But, human behavior, particularly human social behavior is complex. Many a sure thing has foundered on human complexity, and many a ridiculous idea has become the next big thing because of it. After all, the idea of a world class operating system being created and maintained by a worldwide network of volunteers (and people paid to contribute to a free, public work by their employers) would have seemed absurd to nearly anybody with any busienss sense in 1990...
So in short, I'm not going to use this anytime soon, but there maybe somebody out there who will. If there is, it could take on a life of its own.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Everybody needs a sidekick!
"fabric softener? so that's how those hip hop guys get all the babes!"
man... i had no idea some dumbass would make an automated service based on a comercial for a different product.
There's already others doing this (at least in the UK), most notably two commercial services using call centers, Re5ult and AQA, as well as Nuggets, an automatic service.