Blog: Cell Phones

Building an SMS framework to integrate with Drupal

Considering the technology is 15 years old, text messaging is sadly lacking in its ability to integrate with other applications. Luckily that’s about to get easier, and it’s long overdue.

This summer Will White is developing a framework that allows sms functionality to easily integrate with Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. By the end of the summer, he’ll have created a driver-based API that works with common sms service providers and syncs with Drupal core and contributed modules. This means the hottest open source content management system will soon have the best sms integration, and everyone with a Drupal website can take advantage of it.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

These days it seems like celebrities are just drawn to advocacy issues. They act as UN ambassadors like Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman, they co-write books on genocide like Don Cheadle, and they start movements like Bono. So why aren't they taking advantage of one of the most viral forms of advocacy out there - ringtones?

Last night during the finale of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano's cell phone went off and my neighbor Ryan gasped, "I have to get that ringtone." A few minutes later Pauly Walnut's cell phone rang and my friend David commented on how awesome the ringtone was. It almost felt like Pauly let it ring just to play a few extra chords. These weren't gimmicky ringtones pulled from the show's theme song or anything. They were just great sounding ringtones that sounded good and, if overheard in public, might have some hidden meaning to die hard Sopranos fans. And they happened to get some of the best airtime of the year with placement on The Sopranos finale.

With all the star power behind so many advocacy organizations, why aren't more of them going for ringtone placement like this? Why am I curious about this? Guess what I did today. I went looking to buy Tony's ringtone. It wasn't on Cingular's website, or on Sprint's. Even HBO, which has a great mobile site with several ringtones, didn't have it. They only had Joe McBride's "I woke up this morning and got myself a gun" and The Sopranos' theme song as ringtones, which in my opinion are a bit cliche. It was good to see that Phil Gallo with Variety TV gave Pauly Walnut's ringtone a shout out when he praised the music from last night's episode.

The ringtone I wanted - and that my friends wanted - wasn't out there. And why not? I'm sure we weren't the only ones to covet the ringtone. Ringtones have been hot for years, and the idea of integrated product placement is nothing new. CBS did it right last year. During an episode of CSI, Danny Messer's phone went off to the tune of Coldplay's Talk. And then at the commercial break, CBS offered it up for sale. I'm not sure what CBS' response was to this, but it seems like an awesome gimmick to me - one that goes a bit farther than your standard product placement with potentially excellent results.

Imagine what would happen with some star power behind a compelling advocacy issue. Well, American Idol's two-day Idol Gives Back series received more than 70 million calls or text messages. That's insane. Just think of the money that could be raised and the messages that could be spread if Bono released a ringtone during a popular television show for the song Instant Karma which happens to be on a CD Amnesty International is releasing tomorrow to raise awareness and mobilize people to save Darfur. It would surely have a great viral effect and further spread the word about the album and the cause. Heck, if that had been placed during The Sopranos finale, it would have been a huge score even without a product placement in the episode.

So does anyone know how much it would cost to place ringtone in an show?

By the way, if you want to get Tony's ringtone from last night's episode, here is the best link i found.

Using cell phones in outreach campaigns is one way to show that you're tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the flip side is that it's still very much a new notion that is still being tested. At the Politics Online Conference yesterday, one session focused on when and how to use cell phones to organize and communicate.

Development Seed's Eric Gundersen was on of the speakers on the panel, along with Dan Weaver from MobileAccord, Stuart Shapiro from iConstituent, and Justin Oberman from Rave Wireless and MoPocket who moderated.

People always have their cell phones with them and rarely share their phone with their spouse or anyone else. Dan says this is what makes cell phones such a powerful and personal advocacy tool. It also is a great way to let your supporters act for your cause while they go on living their life - sending or receiving a text message or making a quick call really can be done from anywhere.

Almost every hand shot up in the crowded auditorium when Zack Exley, a chief organizer of Roots Camp, asked, "How many of you have been to an election recap meeting?" It was close to 11:00 am on Saturday morning, and 400 progressive political junkies had descended on Washington from all over the country for a different kind of election recap. This time we were just looking at what happened online and what we can learn from each other as we move into the national election.

Ian, Jeff, and I joined the crowed. We weren't sure if it was going to be the official kick off to 2008 campaign planning or if it would simply reveal that there is no break between elections. By the end of the day the energy in the room clearly showed that it was the latter and that everyone was fueled with the momentum of the huge Democratic win and looking for the tools to take it up a notch.

I was at an awesome Netsquared DC Meetup on Tuesday where we learned how SMS (text messaging) could be best used to monitor elections. Since we are in DC, of course there were some people in attendance with first hand expertise at using SMS for international development. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) just finished an SMS pilot project for the Montenegro referendum on independence. NDI’s main office is about two blocks from the bar we were at so Ian Schuler, a friend from the tech scene in DC and ICT Project Manager at NDI told the story of how NDI went about setting up their SMS network, using a combination of a cell phone plugged into a computer to receive incoming messages and an aggregator (Clickatell) to help handle the sending load.  

It’s not that big of a
surprise that Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, also has the hemisphere’s
worst telecommunications system. There are just 140,000 landlines and 540,000
cell phones in the country of more than 8 million people. (I wrote more about Haiti’s cell phone penetration here.)