Walt Mossberg is the personal technology columnist in the Wall Street Journal. I don't like the guy because he is a shameless Apple fanboy, but I'll read his column because I subscribe to the paper. And because he has a sidekick by the name of Katie Bohret ... and I like her.
Anyways, his latest column was about a new service called ChaCha. It is a free service that allows you to call a toll-free number, ask a question, and receive a response via text message. There are actual real live people who receive $.20 per repsonse as questions come through the queue. Mossberg said that they are mainly stay-at-home moms and college students who search online for the answers, but I don't really trust what he says all that much. In my mind, I see hundreds of grey-haired, monacled men who are frantically scrambling around the Library of Congress searching for answers. You know, they are knee-deep in scrap paper woth one or two of them clinging on to those ladders on wheels as they try to find the right page of the right book.
However it happens, in about 3 minutes you receive a text message response. The first time that I read about the service, I was between Queensboro Plaza and the 45th Road Courthouse Square stop on the 7 train on my way to Manhattan. I wanted to give it a shot, but didn't want the hundreds of people that were pressed up against me to think I was strange if I just asked a random question to my cell phone. Part of me wanted to ask something like, "Hi ChaCha. How do you stop explosive episodes of diarrhea every five minutes?" just to see if I could get a little breathing room on the train, but I thought better of it.
Instead, I asked it what the population of Boise was. About 3 minutes later, I received the following text: "The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Boise's population to be 190,117 in 2003. Idaho's population is 1,366,132." Just like that, above and beyond the call of duty. I was impressed, but also had to think it ironic that there were more people on my subway line that morning than there were living in the great state of Idaho.
Now, ChaCha has not been perfect. For example, I asked the question, "What is the day Cinco de Mayo," and it told me that it meant "May 5th." Kind of a slap in the face. I responded to the text (one of the features is that you can follow up with text messages, as if it were a regular converstion) with "No no, what is the holiday's significance?" Pretty straightforward stuff, right? Well, I got in return, "Festivus is an annual holiday invented by writer Dan O'Keefe and introduced into popular culture by his son Daniel, a scriptwriter." Although informative, and a great episode of the '97 season of Seinfeld, obviously not the answer to my question.
An interesting system nonetheless. But it seems like a hard system to monitize, especially since it is run from the phone, not the Web site (i.e. little advertising space). I figured that some company is buying the questions and answers for market research. Or maybe this is a way for the government to collect information about me to sell to the Russians. Something like that. I had a question, I needed an answer ... Where could I turn? Where else but to ChaCha? I called and asked the question, "How does ChaCha make its money?" The response: "ChaCha generates revenue by its strategic partnerships with various entities." AKA Russians.
It has been fun to play around with it, although I'm not sure how productive it is. In many circumstances it may be, but in the context of me sitting at work in front of my computer with Internet access, not so much. I will have you know that through ChaCha I discovered that my horoscope calls for success in professional endeavors and that April 25 is the National Day of Silence for an anti-bullying campaign (sure, that'll convince the bullies to stop beating you up. Just sit quietly.).
The best part, by far, is getting text messages that I pretend are important. It's almost like having a real friend.
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3 years ago
