Jules Says

Wiffiti: your phone and my computer can make beautiful text

In my recent post about Reactee, I mentioned that I enjoy playing with new applications of technology that may seem silly or even useless at first. Wiffiti is another one of those.

With Wiffiti, you have a screen. You can show that screen on the Wiffiti site, full screen on your computer, or embedded in any web page. You have a name - people text @name to your SMS address (a five-digit number) and their message gets broadcast to the screen. Several messages show at a time, floating around the screen, getting smaller as they age.

Try it here - send an SMS message to 25622. Start the message with @jules, then type your message. It'll show up right here :) This screen is live. [update: odd... publishing this post cut off a whole chunk of text after the embedded screen. More of the review & a bunch of screenshots showing usability problems are after the jump.][update 2: if you're looking at this post in a feed reader, you may not see the screen - click through to the actual blog to see it.]

That’s one ugly shirt

You gotta admit, I ended up with one ugly shirt.

Don't get me wrong. I love this idea. I love new ideas that use technology in some interesting way, even if starts out as something silly or useless. Reactee is one of those cool ideas. There's a lot of potential here, but in this incarnation it needs some more work.

I'm pretty sure I first read about these shirts on Gizmodo. I immediately wondered if I should reserve the namespace for any of my various ventures (I like to make sure my potential businesses have properly named accounts on google, twitter, typepad, yahoo, etc.) After all, you just never know which of these new applications will stick.

Rather than impulsively buying a bunch of shirts, it seemed wise to test one first. I decided to go with my version of the LOLCats meme (my second choice shirt was "I can has 2 many cheezeburgers").

When you buy a shirt, your chosen word goes live. Tori got one too, and of course we immediately started texting each other's shirts. Sadly, once you get the reply from someone's shirt, there's nowhere to go. You can't reply again - you haven't opened a thread. All those folks who got shirts saying things like "Want to date me?" will be awfully disappointed.

On the other hand, I suppose a coffee shop, for example, could have all their employees wear "need a buzz?" shirts and respond with something different each day. Parents could have their little kids wear a shirt with "text my mom if I'm lost" on their shirts.

What else should be textable? Pet collars, physical mailboxes, your car ("the left lane is for passing, dude")?