October 16, 2009
Alliance of Youth Movements Summit: SMS to Affect Change
The Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, going on now in Mexico City, is bringing together international NGOs, governments, and experts in technology and media to discuss how non-profits and social causes can benefit from digital tools.
One panel brought together representatives from Twitter, Google, YouTube, MobileAccord and the State Department to discuss "Using Social Networks to Affect Change." But considering most of the NGOs present focused on emerging nations, where broadband access is often limited, are these services actually being used?
The answer is yes, often through the mobile phone. Google lets users conduct searches through SMS. Kristine Morrisey, Principle New Business Development at Google, said that the price of grain in Niger dropped 6% thanks to farmers' ability to SMS prices. MobileAccord bases their platform on text messaging, enabling charitable donations to be made through SMS. Youtube videos, on the other hand, are being distributed on flash drives, meaning the user doesn't need broadband to view it.
As for Twitter, co-founder Jack Dorsey says the service was designed for the lowest common denominator. Through their short codes, which they are working to set up internationally, users can text in their tweets and receive SMS updates. The whole concept of limiting messages to 140 characters was so that even the lowest-end Nokia phone could be accommodated.
When quantifying usage abroad, we must also look at how these services are being used. The U.S. is very web-centric, Dorsey pointed out, so the majority of users access the service through a computer. In most other countries, though, Twitter is most often used on mobile phones. And while many U.S. users are sharing links, emerging nations use it more for simple status updates. This is exactly how the service evolved here: from updates and status to conversations to an RSS-replacement, an aggregator of information.
In general, there is still a lot of room for services to be built upon SMS, just as they are built using open APIs on the web. While SMS is definitely a more closed system than the web--and often prohibitively expensive--that is changing. And the more developers push the platform, the more it will need to change and adapt.
