Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

16/01/08 Familiarity of an SMS Share

SINGAPORE - It hit me last night. With all this talk of digital ‘Social Objects‘ and the ‘share factor‘ something ticked over in my mind. We’ve seen this all before and from a most unlikely source, Nokia - in the form of SMS objects.

That little Nokia “Phonebook Object” where you could SMS an entry to another contact was genius. How many people do you know who will ‘text’ you someone’s number for 10c from their phonebook rather than just call it out. It was a reason to want a Nokia model phone, when you got the object it wasn’t garbled text like on an Ericsson, on your Nokia you could automatically [save to phonebook]. If you didn’t have a Nokia, you weren’t in the club.

So what made that little simple feature so wildly popular? Why would you hand money over for 2 lines of text, which you already knew the first one (the name) and the second line (the number) wasn’t much harder to read out. Especially when the sender, not the person who gets the object has to pay. It must have social pull. A social object you can share.

Continuing the Nokia spin on this, ex-Nokia now-Jaiku Jyri Engeström posted 5 Principles of Social Object Theory (slideshow embedded at bottom). Let’s see how they fit to the SMS sharing model.

1. Define the object round which your service is built.

Phonebook entry. It has a name & phone number.

2. Define the key verbs for that object

[Send by SMS] [Send by Infrared] [Send by Bluetooth]
[View Item] [Save to Phonebook]

3. Make the object shareable!

Any list of wireless technologies could duplicate it across the network.

4. To grow your userbase, think about what can you provide in terms of a gift users can offer their friends

Nokia handsets.

5. Work out a business model where you charge the publisher, not the spectators.

The sender foots the SMS bill. It’s free to the receiver.

So not only did this become ingrained in our behaviour to the point of “call out your number to me and I’ll text you this one”, but it also managed to reverse the traditional and charge the person offering the information, not the person requesting it.

So - if the SMS share is so simple, so common, so easy… why haven’t we seen more tiny Mobile Social Objects? (and I’m talking more than ring-tones, operator logos & backgrounds).

(Image Credit: Singapore ‘Thieves Market’, where any object is brought to be traded, by Author.)

-Robin

Tags: entry, General, mobile, nokia, phonebook, sharing, sms, social, texting

2 Comments

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18/01/08 Alexia Golez » Blog Archive » Red Links 18/01/07

[...] Robin looks at the sociability of SMS Sharing. [...]

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23/01/08 Robin Blandford [ByteSurgery] » Making Your Mark: Operator Logos - Digital Media Engineer

[...] - Continuing my theme of looking at the most popular digitally ’shared’ objects, I again get drawn back to ‘mobile shares’, ringtones, screensavers and backgrounds. [...]

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