How Not To Do Mobile Chat

OK, this is nuts! Apparently Cingular is all excited about their new mobile chat room designed for fans of that annoying (sorry, but it is) show called American Idol. This would all be fine and good if they were truly using a cost effective chat room. The cold and quite frankly; expensive reality is that it has very costly aftertaste.

Cingular is trumpeting its new mobile chat room offering for fans of American Idol. Of course, it’s not actually a chat room and it will cost you dearly to discover that. It’s really just a case study in how not to do mobile chat.

It seems that mobile operators still have trouble understanding that mobile phones are a communications platform where communications should be encouraged, not discouraged. Instead, they continue to view it as a delivery platform where they want to charge for everything.

With American Idol SMS voting being the regular case study for teaching American kids how to use SMS, it appears that Cingular is trying to take the concept further — but in a way that hardly seems compelling. The company has added what it calls a mobile chat service for American Idol. Most people, of course, would assume that such a mobile chat would be similar to a regular online chatroom, where lots of people can discuss any particular subject — in this case, the TV show American Idol. [Read the rest]