SMS 411

Tiger Woods recently got into trouble partly because his wife, Elin Nordegren, discovered incriminating voicemails and text messages on his phone, news reports allege.

He might not have had that problem if he’d used the cleverly-named TigerText, which promises it can let you “send texts that don’t live forever.”

TigerText is an application that runs on your iPhone. (Android and BlackBerry versions are planned soon.) To use it, the people you’re exchanging messages with need to have the TigerText app as well.

When you send a message, you can specify how long the message will stick around. After the specified time period, it’s deleted from TigerText’s servers — and both of your phones. No incriminating evidence left!

You can even create messages that can only be read once, and then self-destruct as soon as they’re read, Mission Impossible-style.

Here’s the catch: It’s not really SMS. Yes, you’re sending short text messages back and forth. But you’re not using the SMS text messaging service that works with the vast majority of phones out there. It only works if both people — the sender and the recipient — are using TigerText.

Still, if you’ve got a guilty conscience, or something you just plain need to hide, TigerText could be a clever way to do it.

TigerText Deletes Text Messages From Receiver’s Phone (Wired)

TigerText website

TigerText iPhone App

If you are in Haiti and need to report an emergency situation, send a text message to the shortcode 4636.

This works with any SMS-capable cellphone on the DigiCel network.

Messages sent to that code will be entered into a database. A group of volunteers with an organization called Ushahidi will read each message, figure out where it’s coming from, and relay the necessary information to rescue teams. In some cases the response can be extremely fast:

“The average turnaround for us receiving a message and having a geo-coordinated and translated report to teams on the ground is about 10 minutes,” one volunteer told a Wired reporter.

It has already saved lives: In one case, someone sent a message to 4636 about a group of schoolchildren trapped in a collapsed school. Ushahidi volunteers were able to pinpoint the location with great accuracy and send a rescue team, according to the report on Wired.

For more information: The 4636 SMS Shortcode for Reporting in Haiti

Hello! R U out there?

Here’s your chance to make first contact with an alien life form, by sending a 160-character text message into outer space.

An Australian science magazine, COSMOS, is working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to deliver the messages by beaming them in the direction of Gliese 581D, an exoplanet that scientists think might have a chance of supporting Earth-like life.

To send a message, go to HelloFromEarth.net and enter your message on the form there. You’ll need to register by supplying your name, email, and hometown, and optionally subscribing to the COSMOS email newsletter. Do it before the end of Sunday, August 23, 2009.

On August 24, all the messages received will be bundled into a text file, encoded in binary, and beamed into space from the NASA/CSIRO Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, near Canberra, which has a 70-meter antenna.

Gliese 581D is 20.3 light-years away, in the constellation of Libra, so it will take a bit more than 20 years for the messages to arrive. As for a response? Well, don’t hold your breath. There’s no guarantee that the aliens will understand SMS abbreviations.

Americans send about 20 billion text messages per month, according to a cell phone industry group that has apparently counted them all. Sound like a lot? That’s only 85 messages per month per cell phone subscriber, or not quite 3 per day.

By comparison, Korean teenagers are sending an average of 2,000 messages per month — 60 per day.

How many text messages do you send in a day?

As you may know, if you use Skype, you can send SMS text messages to your friends’ cell phones. Skype charges a small amount per message (less than your cell phone provider does) and makes it easy to send one SMS to multiple recipients, so this can be an easy and economical way to text several of your friends at once. Now, this week only, Skype has cut its usual SMS rate in half.

Between May 2 and May 8, Skype users who send SMS messages to recipients in the United States, Australia, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Belgium, Thailand, Ireland, Austria, and Italy will be charged half the usual rate. Before the week-long reduction, Skype charged $0.112 per message sent to recipients in the United States, $0.088 to Australia, and $0.063 to Thailand.

That means it will cost only about five cents per SMS message to US cell phone addresses. Cheap!

Skype Cuts SMS Fees In Half

You don’t have to be a big company to set up a text-message auto-response system. With TextMarks, you can set up a quick-and-dirty text message information system for free. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your customers or friends, to promote your website or services, or just to provide useful information.

To use TextMarks for receiving information, you send short codes to the TextMarks number (41411). TextMarks then sends the information back that corresponds to the code you sent.

For example, someone set up the code “sftides” — so if you send an SMS containing the word “sftides” to 41411, you’ll get the latest ocean tides for San Francisco. The image of the phone on this post shows what you get when you send the code “kqed” — it’s what’s currently playing on the radio station KQED.

The brilliant part is that it’s really easy to set up your own TextMarks codes. You just need to pick a short code that isn’t already being used on TextMarks. Then you tell TextMarks what information to deliver when somebody sends that code to TextMarks. This could be a short piece of text, or you can tell TextMarks to pull a specific piece of information from a page on your web site.

Or, you can set up a subscription service — essentially an SMS mailing list — so you can send text messages to everyone who has subscribed. For example, if you send the code “ufos” you’ll be subscribed to an alert service for major UFO sightings. (Pretty useful if you anticipate an alien invasion!)

Whenever someone sends a text message with your code to the TextMarks number (41411), they’ll get an SMS reply containing the information you specified, or they’ll be subscribed to your info service if that’s what you’ve set up.

I set up the code “haiku” to send the latest poem from my daily haiku site. To do it, I had to tell TextMarks where to find the text of the day’s haiku on the site’s homepage. I did that by giving it information about two specific HTML tags. On your site, you might use something different.

It took all of about 5 minutes to set up the code and test it. Now anyone can get the day’s haiku just by texting “haiku” to 41411.

Some other TextMarks you can send to 41411 include:

leo, aquarius, virgo, etc: Daily horoscope for that zodiac sign
trackups [tracking number]: Shipping status for a UPS package
checkwoot: what’s on sale today at Woot.com
haha: joke of the day

There’s an extensive list of TextMarks on the site, and you can test each one out right on the web page using TextMarks’ handy simulator.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if your phone could remind you about important dates, events you need to remember, and things you need to do on your way home from work?

With SMS reminders, you can easily use your phone as a memory aid. And it’s far easier than trying to figure out your phone’s calendar application to set yourself an alarm (or — worse — trying to sync your phone with your computer-based calendar).

The trick is finding a service that will send reminders to your phone. I know of at least three easy alternatives.

If you’re already using an online calendar like Yahoo Calendar or Google Calendar, SMS reminders are already built in to the calendar. All you need to do is select the right option. And if you’re not using one of these calendars, Backpack has a terrific SMS reminder service that’s also free.

With both calendar services you’ll need to confirm your phone number and carrier before you can use the SMS reminder service. They’ll send a test message to your phone containing a secret code, and once you enter this code on the site, you’re good to go.

With Yahoo Calendar, when you create a new event, look for the “Reminders” section about two thirds of the way down the new event form. In that section, you tell Yahoo when to send reminders (it can send you two — for instance, one message two days before the event, and one 15 minutes before it starts) and where to send them: your Yahoo Messenger account, your email address, or your mobile device.

At the specified times, Yahoo will fire off a text message to you, letting you know what’s coming up.

In Google Calendar, you can only select one reminder (but you can tell Google how far in advance of your event that you want it to start). Look for the “Reminder” option in the “Options” section of the “Create Event” form on Google Calendar. It’s just a simple select box. To set up where you want to receive reminders, you need to go to Settings and then click on the Notifications tab. On that tab, you can tell Google how you want to be notified for various types of events (such as upcoming appointments in your calendar or invitations from other Google Calendar users); one of the options is SMS.

Not using either of these online calendars? Your easiest option is probably the Reminders service built in to Backpack. Backpack is an easy-to-use service for creating web pages, taking notes online, and even maintaining to-do lists. Its simplest version includes the reminders service, and its free. You’ve got to create a new Backpack account if you don’t already have one. Then go to the Settings tab on your Backpack site, enter your mobile phone number and carrier, and tell Backpack that’s how you want to receive reminders. (You can also enter an email address.)

Then, to set a reminder, all you have to do is visit the Reminders tab on your Backpack site. Type the text of the reminder you want and specify a time to be reminded. For instance, you can choose from “Later today” (about 5pm your time), “tomorrow morning,” “in a week,” “in a year,” or at a particular date and time you specify. Then click on the Set Reminder button.

The nice thing about Backpack’s reminders is that reminders are very quick to set up, and you can see all of your pending reminders in a simple list — you don’t have to hunt through your calendar to find them. On the other hand, it is another service to keep track of, so if you’re already using an online calendar, that may be an easier option.