I have two small children, I’m a fan of last minute playdates, and I send the occasional text message from my cell phone.
It’s Saturday morning and over breakfast my wife and I decide to bring the kids to the zoo. I send out a text that says “good chance we’ll be at the zoo when it opens this morning.”
My friend Alice (these names have been changed), whose daughter is friends with mine, gets my text on her phone. So does my friend Charlie, whose has a son around my daughter’s age. Alice is tied up and can’t come but Charlie didn’t have any plans and texts back that he’ll meet us near the gorillas.
My friend Bob didn’t get the text. That’s because while he has memberships for the aquarium and the children’s museum, he doesn’t have one for the zoo and isn’t particularly interested about playdates there.
I could implement this in a fairly low tech way by setting up different groups in my cell phone…
- zoo
- children’s museum
- aquarium
- city park
… and then explain the idea to friends and ask if they’d like to be part of one or more of the groups in my cell phone.
Simply setting up groups like this in my cell phone is probably what I’ll do. But maybe there could be a service for this. You sign up and define locations like those above. Then your friends would look at your profile and sign up to receive text messages for some or all of the locations you’ve defined. If you’re going to be out of town, are just too busy for playdates at the moment, or just want to tweak your settings, you could choose to stop getting texts altogether, for certain locations, from certain people, or for certain locations from certain people.
I’ve looked for services do this already. playfoursquare.com and brightkite.com seem like the best contenders (Google Latitude doesn’t work over text messages), but as far as I can tell, with these services you receive all notifications from your friends, not notifications from friends only for locations you’re interested in, which is what I want.
Update: March 4, 2011
Some other services:
Update: March 5, 2011
I posted this idea to Built It With Me.