danbruno.net

Continuing in the vein of weblog criticism, here’s an excerpt from a recent kottke.org post in which he proposes a new cell phone feature, “sweethearting”:

The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.

Oh hell no. What is this, Yahoo! Instant Messenger? Do we need something with even less content than “hey c u 2nite gtg”? And how, exactly, is “Pick up milk on the way home” improved by “Hey, when I ping you later, that’s your signal to pick up milk on the way home”?

This is communication headed in the wrong direction. Sorry, Jason.

(I do grudgingly admit, however, that if a cell phone company picked this feature up and actually called it “sweethearting,” perhaps with a heart-shaped button on the keypad, it’d take off instantly.)