Two Cents

Is there nothing that social media can’t touch?

Even the simple pleasure of admiring one of your fellow travellers in another car may never be the same again. It seems a new service in the USA called WhyHonk lets you get in touch with other drivers,  based on their number plate.

The WhyHonk service lets you send a voice message to any car you see by dialing a number and leaving their license plate number along with your message. It’s then converted to text and added to a searchable database. You can search your license plate number for messages online, on their mobile site, or register it to get the messages straight to your cellphone.

Of course, apart from leaving messages for potential suitors, this kind of thing could have some more practical applications – like simply letting drivers know they’ve left their lights on. Or letting them know the license plate of another driver who’s dinged their car.

Hats off to the smart folk behind WhyHonk. What will they think of next…?

I love the research that comes out of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in the USA. I’ve always imagined Pew to be the kind of place that American research boffins aspire to work – somewhere people actually listen to and read what you’ve discovered!

Their latest report is typically insightful. It’s called Future of the Internet III: How the Experts See It. It has a heap of interesting conclusions (which I encourage you to check out), but there are two that are particularly interesting when contrasted:

• The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world in 2020: 77% agree.
• By 2020, social tolerance has advanced significantly due in great part to the internet: 33% agree.

There you have it folks. Despite all the great things that have already come, and will come, from ubiquitous connectivity, lightning-fast information and the ability to share with any other human being at any time… we’ll all still be hating on each other in 12 years. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s a bit depressing coming from the finest minds in the business.

I guess we can always hope Ray Kurzweil is right – we’ll all be well on our way to being quasi-robots by then anyway

If you’ve never screamed obscenities at your computer don’t read on; you obviously don’t shop online. If you do shop online you have, at some time, become frustrated to the point of incipient computercide.

My favourite love to hate sites are those that take a time gobbling stream of details including card number, addresses, etc. then on a click of the “Next” button shoot you back to a blank page because you’ve made some obscure syntactical error.

Then there’s the movie site where you choose a string of details, then, at the click of the next button, find that there are no available seats. Start again.

Then there are the software sites that require a 75 digit serial number always including underscores that look like hyphens and zeroes that look like Os.

But this post is not really about badly designed ecommerce sites, it’s about trying to complain – another world of hurt.

With steam coming out your ears and spittle all over your screen you click the, “Contact Us”. Never do that. You will find yourself clogged in a cyber filtration system trying to FAQ you.

If you do eventually lodge a question you will be thrilled to find, in about 5 microseconds, that the site has received your question, that it is deemed important and will be dealt with within 48 hours. Yeah right.

I have a wild and wacky answer to all this grief – the telephone! I know that sounds grossly analogue but it can be a VOIP based phone and the call centre can be in Bangalore if that works. Yes it will cost a little more but the lost sale becomes an achieved sale and the chip spitting customer becomes a loyal, repeat customer.

A great way to make new friends.