Mingle From Your Cell Phone

Why bother with clumsy mobile social networking services (or easy to use Facebook Web pages, but that’s another matter) when you could connect with your friends via text messages? That’s the reasoning behind Bouncephone, an SMS text-based social networking service.

Here’s how it works: Text the word Bounce to 99899 to create a keyword profile. Then text in keywords to describe the person you want to meet (e.g., female musician 312 Lakers fan). From there, the service will start matching you with people. Once you find someone you like, you can add them to your friend list to send direct messages and follow their status, again all from your cell phone.

It’s an interesting idea in that it plays to the lowest common denominator in terms of tech—virtually everyone has a cell phone that’s capable of sending text messages. But the “easy-to-use” concept is a bit of a stretch; we suppose if you grew up on DOS it’s easy to use, but we’d prefer a mobile Web interface.

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