I received pictures from Jordan of Pathable at FOWA today. Jordan reports that Pathable was well received at the event.
It inspired me to review the Pathable SMS service usage statistics. Pathable SMS allows people to communicate with each other using ad hoc text messaging groups based on their profile tags. For example, if I added “developer” to my profile I would then receive any text messages sent to the “developer” tag. It’s the second time we’ve ever deployed the service at a large event so we are still learning how people are using it and tweaking the system accordingly. (Messages are publicy posted in the crowdvine FOWA network, by the way.)
Out of all the attendees about 540 had profiles in the FOWA social network in Crowdvine, out of which another 95 added their phone numbers to join the Pathable SMS service. Given these numbers I’m fairly surprised and pleased at the level of usage we observed. 222 messages were recieved, which resulted in approximately 1100 outbound messages. See figure for usage by day. The conference was from Oct 2 to Oct 5.
Below are the messages sent to the “developer” tag. You can see how it was used for coordination.
I broke down the incoming messages by type to gain a better understanding of command usage. We had many of the typical commands for text messaging services, including “who” to see who was in a tag or “tags” to see which tags a person had. Aside from broadcast messages, people largely sent in help which returned the syntax for the rest of the commands. Not too many messages were command errors.
I think the utility of ad hoc, interest-based text messaging groups for large conferences is fairly clear. The challenge for us is helping users develop trust and familiarity with the system to increase usage. Our biggest limiting factor at FOWA was simply the number of people willing to provide their phone number in their profiles. As the system becomes smoother and people develop familiarity and trust with it I imagine usage of Pathable SMS will increase.
