Over the next bit I’m going to profile a number of different Unified Self-Service examples to show how multi-channel communication can help connect people with the information they want using the communication channel of their choice.
The first example I’ll mention is the “opensenate” project that independent developer Mark Headd launched back in June 2009 shortly after we had acquired IMified. As Mark describes in a blog post, he used IMified, the PHP programming language and the NY State Senate Open Legislation API to create a service where anyone can find out the status of any bill before the NY State Senate through voice, SMS, IM or Twitter.
You can try this service yourself through any of these channels (two bills I’ve used as a query are “s1234″ and “s2411″):
| Phone:
| (646) 736-2439 |
| SMS:
| (315) 308-1943 |
| Jabber IM:
| opensenate@bot.im |
| Twitter:
| @opensenate |
When I sent in a query on the status of a bill via Jabber IM to “opensenate@bot.im”, the response looked like this:
Which nicely provides the link to the bill in question.
The same query sent it to Twitter as a public “@” message generated this response:
again with a link to the bill. Similarly, a SMS to 315-308-1943 produced this response on my iPhone:
And of course you can call the application on the phone, too.
ONE application – four different communication channels.
Now, if Mark wanted to, he could have added other IM interfaces like Yahoo, AOL or MSN. He could have added a web interface… although there already is a web interface through the NY State Senate.
Note, too, that Mark created this application without any connection to the NY State Senate. He was not employed or paid by the state of NY. He doesn’t even live in New York! The NY State Senate CIO Office made the OpenLeg API publicly available… Mark seized on it as an interesting experiment to mash up with IMified… and an application was born!
Now, this application was connected to a government database, but imagine offering the same kind of capability to a corporate package tracking system? Or a customer support knowledgebase?
Stay tuned for more examples…
P.S. For the developers out there who would like to experiment with this application yourself, Mark Headd has made the PHP code available for download on the Github service. You just need to set it up on your own server and then use a (free) IMified.com account to connect to the various communication channels. You will also need a free account on our Evolution developer portal to add voice. For those who want to play more, Mark later added support for “Prowl” push notifications to the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Would you like to quickly and easily build applications that provide self-service through both voice and SMS/texting?
Want to develop multi-channel applications that work with the iPhone and other mobile browsers?
Recently when I was discussing the whole concept of “
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