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."

Comments

spam?

[ErichTheWebGuy]

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!!!

Accuracy and reliability?

[britneys 9th husband]

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?)

Re:Please Stop The Roland Articles!!

[Espectr0]

The real question is, why does Slashdot continue to accept every single one of his submissions when many of the readers see through the scam and whole-heartedly object to what he is doing?

Theory: he splits his profits with slashdot editors. He uses slashdot's users to gain money and pays a little commission in order to do that. What other explanation exists?

maybe you don't check deep enough

[DarkTempes]

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

Brilliant

[kent_eh]

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).