Whether you’re looking for true love or virtual love-or simply want to play hooky from work-your mobile phone can help.
While handset manufacturers and carriers are scrambling to make space-age mobile devices that double as on-the-go entertainment centers, savvy wireless users are using phones for a decidedly old-fashioned purpose: to meet people who share a common interest. Even if the common interest involves, say, cheating on a lover.
That’s the idea behind the “alibi and excuse club,” a text message-based network of 7,500 wireless users who provide alibis and excuses for fellow members. A married man who’s late coming home from work, for instance, will solicit help via a text message, then arrange for someone to call his wife, pose as his boss, and explain his tardiness.
The club is just one of about 150,000 such cliques that have been created at Sms.ac, according to Greg Wilfahrt, executive vice president and co-founder. Club topics range from the obvious (flirting and sports) to the political (George Bush for president) to the inexplicable (Fans of Vanilla Ice, a club with 18,000 members based in Romania).
The popularity of short message service has been enormous in Asia and Europe for years, but only recently have American users warmed to text messaging. And what’s driving it is simply a need for people to connect with like-minded wireless users.
“I think it’s one of the major trends,” said Scott Ellison, program director of wireless and mobile communications for IDC. “We’ve gone from voice communications to messaging to now forming communities” through wireless devices.
Indeed, a recent poll by The Yankee Group shows 63 percent of wireless users have the ability to send and receive text messages-up from just 27 percent last year. And teens are among the most active users, sending or receiving an average of 10 text messages every week.
“The U.S. has really skyrocketed as far as adoption goes,” said Wilfahrt. “We’ve seen roughly a 65-percent increase (in U.S. subscribers) over the last 90 to 100 days. It’s just unbelievable growth.”
Sms.ac helps stoke that growth by commissioning members to found new clubs and act as a catalyst for text discussions. Club “owners” earn 10 percent of the revenues they help create by fostering discussions.
“Their job (as club owners) is to make sure members don’t receive messages that just say, `Hey people, what’s up?’ ” Wilfahrt explained. “It’s the owner’s job to moderate every single message that goes into the club and keep topics relevant.”
Many blame early interoperability issues for the lukewarm reception U.S. consumers gave SMS several years ago, when text messages often couldn’t be sent from one carrier to another. And wireless users were slow to see the advantages of ham-handedly typing out messages when it seemed easier just to make a call.
But the ability to reach outside an immediate circle of friends to others has helped spark the vigorous uptake.
“Part of the attraction isn’t just reaching out to people you know,” said Wilfahrt. “It’s about reaching out to people all over the world who have the same interests as you.”
And just as there are an infinite number of topics around which to build a club, there are an infinite number of ways to use text messaging. Hearing-impaired users are reading their handsets instead of struggling with the audio. And a school district in Ireland is using SMS to let parents know if their children are absent.
“We’re being surprised every day we get out of bed,” Wilfahrt said. “It’s the consumers who are the big innovators here-they’re using (SMS) in ways we never thought they would.”
The user next door
While some users are joining clubs to create cross-continental friendships, many are using wireless devices to connect to the girl (or boy) next door. Dodgeball, a primarily SMS-based service available in 15 cities, allows users to create a list of friends who’ve registered on the site.
Members can send messages to friends by giving simply a time and location-say, “Cheers at 5:30”-as an invitation. And the service will find any friends of friends within 10 blocks of a meeting, alerting them with a message like, “Joe is at Cheers. You know him through Melissa.”
Dodgeball even features picture messaging, allowing spontaneous blind dates to be a little less blind.
Even more high-tech is SpotMeeting, a location-based service that can track mobile users and give them the locations of other members who are within walking distance.
“SpotMeeting is a revolutionary service for singles that lets them find a date instantly, and usually within walking distance,” said SpotMeeting Chief Executive Officer Chester Yeum. “Other available online dating sites are limited in their reach because they’re missing the key ingredient-location.”
“Shame on them”
Of course, Sms.ac doesn’t corner the market when it comes to lies and excuses. Last month, Cingular Wireless L.L.C. joined Virgin Mobile in offering wireless users a way to bolt from a disastrous date.
“Escape-A-Date,” similar to Virgin’s “Rescue Ring,” will call at a pre-set time to lend a helping hand to those too timid to honestly call it a night. “This is your `Escape-A-Date call,” the caller says. “If you’re looking for an excuse, I got it. Just repeat after me… .”
The dater is then fed lines about an innocuous emergency, such as a roommate being locked out of the house, then given instructions on how to flee.
Kargo, a New York mobile content provider, has created background noises such as the din of a traffic jam that emanate from the phone. A user can call her boss, complain about the bottleneck, and explain why she’s not at the board meeting.
But Kargo CEO Harry Kargman insists that such an example isn’t the reason the service was created.
“It empowers people to have fun with their cell phones in a new and interesting way,” said Kargman. “If (users) decide to use it for bad, then shame on them.”
Virtual girlfriend
Finally, if the idea of a face-to-face meeting is too much, there’s Virtual Girlfriend, which launched in Asian third-generation markets last month. The game allows users to interact with animated women who shop, dine and go dancing as they toy with the emotions of their would-be boyfriends.
Gamers can send text or multimedia messages to the cartoon coquettes, whose behaviors are “based on scientific principles and algorithms,” according to publisher Artificial Life. And users are encouraged to send gifts to the characters to move on to more sophisticated levels.
A Virtual Boyfriend is expected in February.
Regardless of how they’re used, though, the attractiveness of such uses will only increase as technology improves, said Athena Platis, director of wireless Internet development at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.
“Newer and better applications are going to enhance everything,” Platis said. “The advantages of video dating are obvious. It’s still so new; it’s very exciting … and it’s a symptom of something else: Wireless has taken over, creeping its way into every facet of our lives.”
