January 15, 2007 at 10:06 am · Authored by Ewan · Filed under SMS

Have you been listening to BBC Radio 1’s Scott Mills in the afternoon recently? I can’t, but I get the ‘best bits’ sent to my via the BBC podcast service every evening. I find it good on-demand entertainment.

The show uses text quite a lot. Radio 1 has it’s own dedicated and very well used 81199 shortcode that the DJs have real-time access to. For example, they’re able to come up with quizzes, competitions or games by just asking the audience to text in a particular set of keywords. The DJs or their support staff are then able to monitor the performance from, I imagine, a screen on their desk.

Some make more use than others and Scott Mills in particular uses the text medium heavily as a way of interacting with his audience.

They recently came up with a game, “I Love You Roulette”. Here’s how it works.

- You open up your text message screen on your handset, and you type ‘I Love You’ into the window.

- You then progress to the ’send to who?’ stage generally common to all handsets.

- Now, you should be at your address book, ready to pick a recipient from it?

- Close your eyes. Now scroll. If you’re doing this real-time with the show, Scott Mills will guide you through the process and will tell you to ‘keep scrolling, keep scrolling’ … then he’ll yell ‘STOOOOOOOOOOOOP’. With your eyes closed, you must press ‘enter’ on the currently selected recipient. Then press enter again to send the message.

Heh.

So, you don’t know who you’re sending the ‘I Love You’ text to. It yielded all kinds of potentially embarrassing and exciting results e.g. Pupils texting teachers, people texting takeaway restaurants, taxis and so on.

If you’re feeling adventurous, give it a go yourself.

They were doing this a lot of last week, however you can download this relevant mp3 file here as it contains the first iteration.