Wed, 21 Feb 2007

Movie ratings by SMS

There seem to be many more items pushed onto my stack than popped off at the moment, but here's one that didn't stay on untouched for too long...

Sid Yadav's recent TextMarks post introduced me to the company and their "user generated" SMS content service. I was intrigued by the service as I've had a simple "premium SMS" idea in my mind for at least a year but wouldn't have a clue about how to actually provide such a service. I now realise that should have made me think "Hmmm, maybe there's a business in making it easy for people to provide premium SMS content"--but it didn't, TextMarks however seem to be more in tune with such thoughts. :-)

The idea

How many times have you stood in a video store or at a movie theatre lacking inspiration, looked at the your viewing options and wondered which movie to take a risk seeing? And how many times have you gotten home and discovered the movie you ended up seeing rated a 2.1 on the Internet Movie Database?

So how about SMSing a text message: 

MOOVINFO Norbit
to a information number and getting the IMDB rating back in response? Well, that was my idea and I began to wonder if TextMark would enable me to implement it in a basic form.

Getting started

The good news is I'm impressed how easy it is to set up a simple "Hello World" automated response on the TextMark site: Two form fields, no sign-up and a simple button press later and it's all set up. You don't even need a phone to test it as they offer a cellphone simulator to try the service out--unfortunately that's just as well because it's a US-only service at present.

You can also set up more sophisticated responses including causing the TextMark system to retrieve the content of a URL that can include parameters supplied in the original SMS message. Any TextMark created by an unregistered user expires after 24 hours. I'm assuming registration is also limited to US carriers at present as it requires a SMS confirmation message.

Setting up a movie rating TextMark

It's really not much more effort (on the TextMark side of things at least) to set up a more dynamic response, here's a screenshot of the setup:

The URL has a \0 at the end to indicate the user's message should be appended to the query: http://words.rancidbacon.com/moovinfo/index.cgi?\0

Checking out the result

Using the phone simulator we can send the required text message (left) and see the response (right):

 
I think I'll be steering clear of Norbit...

On the backend

Unfortunately setting up the backend involved a fair bit of yak-shaving due to needing to install sqlite on the server and having some issues with making it staticly linked but I got it sorted eventually.

The IMDB rating information was grabbed from one of the mirror servers--more details on the IMDB data are available. I pulled the flat text file into a sqlite database to speed things up and make querying easier. A simple Python script glues it all together and Bob's your uncle.

(I should mention this proof of concept probably isn't actually following the IMDB data terms of use but hopefully noone's feathers will be ruffled.)

Verdict

I'm impressed how easy it is to get started and implement a useful service in a fairly simple manner. Once registration and availability is expanded to more areas TextMarks will be worth another visit.

Obviously the "success" of any user-created TextMark (and it looks like there is shared revenue potential) will be a combination of utility and promotion--it'll be interested to see what develops.

If any US-based readers can try the MOOVINFO service out on a real cell before the TextMark expires I'd be interested in hearing from you. :-)

Update: I'm still impressed--within a couple of hours of posting to the TextMarks support forums (again, no rego required) I had email from the support team offering to enable me to get a registered account.

Update 2: And mere minutes after that I'm all set up with an account and MOOVINFO is now somewhat permanent.

Posted at: 06:30 | category: / | Comments ()