Maybe I’m way off base, but I’m away from my team during the GLR and am trying to get up to the minute info on my phone… So, I thought if you wanted to add something cool to TBA (or SOAP), you could have the ability for people to enter their carrier, their phone number, and them maybe type in team #'s for information they want to get. Or even events.
Maybe, you could type in your home team and each time your team score is posted, or you win an award, it either sends you a TM or email. Or you could put in 5 teams and then you would get info on those teams. This might come useful in Atlanta where teams you are interested in are on other fields…
Or maybe you put in an event, and every 5 matches, it sends you an email with an update…
Maybe I’m just frustrated trying to get quick info on my team while I’m gone…
Epsode #327of .Net Rocks!](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/), has an inteview with Jon Goodyear who explains some of the difficulties of doing large volume text messageing.
Another issue is that info on those sites is delayed, so the info still wouldn’t be upto date.
If you didn’t care about the possible delay, that wouldn’t be too hard to implement. If someone was ambitious they could even implement that as a third party service which gets info from TBA using the TBA api at a given interval(maybe every 1-5min.).
I have a console application you can run which is able to monitor a team for updates. It checks TBA at some interval and sends e-mail(s) to notify people of the change.
I considered writeing a simple web interface for it, but I don’t have a web server availiable to run it on.
If anyone is intersted contact me, and I’ll send you a copy.
This is a very interesting idea, I would use it if it were good. There are a few barriers to this, though:
The user interface is HUGE. When you are working with a limited amount of text space to send, every character counts. So what is important to some teams? How their favorite team is doing? This isn’t something you could design quickly, this actually requires thought.
Also, how to actually send the messages is important. Many carriers offer an email interface, but the email from line (which I think you could leave out… have not tested actually) takes up quite a bit of your message, plus it is just obnoxious. And you would have no way to request information via text that way, you would have to use a web browser. I am not familiar how to send SMS messages directly from the Internet, I do not believe that is how the system works anyways.
First thing to consider: What data do people want?
The list I can come up with from experience is:
How their favorite team is doing; Upcoming matches; All match scores and who played (including more detailed statistics like, this years game as an example, laps made, balls hurdled, and most of all, penalties).
Different message formats could be put together as necessary, depending on the data wanted.
Yes, I automatically assumed SMS messages, not everyone has email on their phone. Emailed reports would be slightly simpler. But still a pain, and not as convenient.
I can definitely see something like this being feasible. Difficult, but feasible.
Sending SMS from a server is easy, and relies on the fact that most carriers have email-to-SMS mapping done. It’s the SMS-to-server that gets difficult, and requires a SMS gateway.
But supposing this was overcome, such a text message should be short and precise. The following sample contains the next match time at Atlanta (this would be the two or three letter abbreviation for each regional/division), the current team ranking, and the current event and entire season results.
Team 0000: Up next: ATL 15:30; Ranking: ATL 16 of 80; Results: ATL 0-0-0, SEASON 0-0-0
IMO, I would love to have a simple web interface where you put in, say 10 team #'s and when a match with their score is posted, you get a TM showing match results. And then, maybe if you put Arch, or Curie, or Newton, or Gali and a time interval (i.e. every 10 matches or every 5 matches) you get an update on who the top 8 or 10 teams are (however much can fit in a TM)…
So…if I put in 217, after their round and it’s posted to TBA, I get a TM saying:
R34
217 1114 2056
222
503 47 67
178
2 217 5-0
So 217, 1114, and 2056 beat 503, 47 and 67 with a score of 222 to 178 in round 34
That last one says they are in 2nd place in their division with a record of 5-0
Then, if I put Newton in as a request, it would give me every 10 matches:
This is a great idea! I would love to see something like this implemented. I was sending text updates to a bunch of friends and family when I was at BAE, and it’d be much easier if I could just have them sign up for an automated text update so they’d know my team’s scores. Plus, I could follow my old teams, and friends’ teams while I’m competing at another event (or division).
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but when I had T-Mobile, what would happen with a extra-large TM came (or I tried to send one), it would count it as two or more. As in, T-Mobile’s limit is 160 characters, I believe. So a 300-character text will come in counting as two messages. Just something to consider.
Maybe research all the major carriers’ character limit and use the lowest one as the maximum for the outgoing messages.
http://playsms.sourceforge.net/ seems very interesting, someone would have to foot the bill for unlimited txting though
My first idea for a match entry: #000 34-22 1111,2222,3333-4444,5555,6666
Much too wide, but that is about the minimum* width required to get everything in there. I don’t know how well I could use it myself, the score board seems much better.
The reason for that is the maximum length of a SMS message payload is 160 7-bit characters. Longer messages are combined into multiple payload deliveries, reassembled by the phone. Two messages together may send up to 306 7-bit characters, since there is a 40-bit header if you split up the message.
I believe is much better then nothing, but personally I personally would have done much more prior testing, as I always stress the user interface component of things, which I must say was quite overlooked in my opinion. The biggest thing is I would like to see a different system used, opposed to an email SMS gateway, which I see as a bit of a hack (quick and dirty) put in to make the SMS component work.
I’ll post in the Email updates thread if I have a comment about that system specifically.
