Recipe and Gardening advice by SMS and Web
Posted on March 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Gardening, Technology.
We’re just playing around with a few ideas on a site called Jaiku this morning (they were bought by Google a few months back). The idea is that you can have discussion channels on particular topics like technology, politics, Bandon GAA, whatever. What makes it (and other great sites like Twitter) so powerful is that you can interact with it entirely through SMS on your phone.
So this morning I created two non-techie ones that I thought might appeal to my more foodie readers. The first is #recipes and the second is #gardening. In both cases the idea was that they could be used for requesting advice (in addition to general chitchat).
The #recipes one was suggested by Michael Kiely and he thought it would be great if you were out shopping and spotted an ingredient and wanted suggestions for mini-recipes so you’d know what else to buy whilst you were there. A quick SMS, a bit more shopping and you might get some suggestions back by SMS.
I thought of the #gardening one and it could also be used in a similar way to #recipes when in a Garden Centre and wondering e.g. is X worth buying, it Y over-priced etc.
Of course you can use both channels on the web too (and obviously type a lot more than 140 characters!).
There are two flies in the ointment. The first is that it’ll need more people on these channels to make them work and the second is that joining Jaiku is officially closed at the minute. Both can be solved in one fell swoop by heading over to Jaiku Invites, setup by Ciarán Rooney and requesting an invite to join.
Give it a go. It’s just a bit of fun and I’ve already had two suggestions on how to cook the fennel bulbs I bought on a whim in Lidl during the week. Any problems using it, just pop a comment here.
3 Comments
Text Your Loves and Loathings to LouderVoice
Posted on November 20, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Reviews.
We’re really excited over on LouderVoice by this latest feature. You can now SMS your reviews directly to the web-site. So if you walk out of a terrible movie or wonderful restaurant or just want to get your opinion on any product or service off your chest, now you can. Those reviews will appear within seconds on the LouderVoice site.
The format is simplicity itself:
Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion
It should look like this on your phone:
Then a few moments later, it will look like this on LouderVoice:
We have two numbers you can use: +353-87-9409325 and due to lots of demand +44-778-6205133
Each SMS costs your standard network rate if you are texting your local country number.
And if you are feeling strongly opinionated, we do accept multi-message SMSes up to slightly more than 400 characters.
Just add your mobile number to your LouderVoice account (or sign-up, it only takes a moment), try it out and let us know what you think.
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