In my recent post about Reactee, I mentioned that I enjoy playing with new applications of technology that may seem silly or even useless at first. Wiffiti is another one of those.
With Wiffiti, you have a screen. You can show that screen on the Wiffiti site, full screen on your computer, or embedded in any web page. You have a name – people text @name to your SMS address (a five-digit number) and their message gets broadcast to the screen. Several messages show at a time, floating around the screen, getting smaller as they age.
Try it here – send an SMS message to 25622. Start the message with @jules, then type your message. It’ll show up right here :) This screen is live. [update: odd... publishing this post cut off a whole chunk of text after the embedded screen. More of the review & a bunch of screenshots showing usability problems are after the jump.][update 2: if you're looking at this post in a feed reader, you may not see the screen - click through to the actual blog to see it.]
Nothing earth-shattering here. Twitter had similar screens going at
SXSW. Still, it’s kind of fun – I’m having a party this weekend and
I’ll set up a laptop showing messages. If I were really ambitious, I’d lug my projector down here and show the messages on the side of my house. Sadly, I am not that ambitious.
Clearly there’s not a whole lot going on on these screens yet. Someone’s going to get clever with it, though, just watch :)
The mapping feature is neat, but I haven’t been able to view screens by
location yet – the map just keeps loading and loading. I also haven’t
been able to load up a new background. I put some new photos up on Flickr with a "gomoll" tag, but Wiffiti isn’t seeing them yet.
Wiffiti is cursed with a clever name and awful spelling. It’ll be
amazing if I publish this post without getting it wrong at least once…
Now, onto usability. I tried to be clever in setting up my first screen, but came up with surprising results…
I wanted people to text @titude. Clever, huh? I never could make it happen. Here’s my first signup attempt:
Obviously, I got confused with the nickname, screen title, and screen code, because I ended up with titude as the screen title (which of course makes sense now) and directions to text to @JulieGomoll. That won’t do – my name is too easily misspelled. And where does my "screen code" appear?
But I figured I knew where things went now, and tried again. Here’s my second signup screen:
But wtf? It’s still not right! Where’s @titude?
@titude appears nowhere :( But… Julie Gomoll as the name, @Jules as the text message. That’ll do for now.
I really do want to figure out how to leave a nicer signoff – I see them customized on other peoples’ screens. Let me know if you figure that one out. In the mean time, go back and text my blog!
