Think of a cell phone or Palm handheld as a can of spray paint.
But instead of tagging a building with it, imagine using it to leave a floating digital message in front of the building, so that people walking by would see your comments on their phone or PDA.
A San Francisco company has developed a wireless content application called HaikuHaiku that will let people with Web-enabled Palm or WAP-enabled mobile phones leave trails of digital messages wherever they go.
At Neoku's site, users can select a neighborhood-level location (such as Manhattan's Upper West Side) and either view or post 3-line haikus specific to that location. There are very few restrictions: haikus don't have to follow the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, and they can be about whatever you want, whether it's your impression of El Capitan at sunset or a romantic tribute to a stranger on the bus.
"My original intent was to turn mobile devices into art objects and get people to write whatever they want," said Jay Bain, co-founder of Neoku, the three-person company that created HaikuHaiku. "But now we're trying to make a legitimate business out of it."
Though Bain admits that HaikuHaiku could be used in "potentially underground and subversive" ways, the company plans to license the application to other mobile-content companies as a way to capture on-the-fly customer feedback, such as restaurant or movie reviews.
Still, "wireless graffiti" remains an ahead-of-its-time concept.
"The challenge we face is how to build a location-based service when location-based technology is not yet available," said Ori Neidich, Neoku's wireless engineer.
At the moment, Neoku's service is simply a global index of messages that can be accessed wirelessly but must be input on the World Wide Web. Users have to register on Neoku's site in order to view or add haikus.
In order to "beam" targeted messages —- for instance, a review of a movie when a user is in the vicinity of a theater where it's playing —- Neoku would have to go through the user's carrier to pinpoint the exact location, which isn't logistically possible yet.
Carriers and handset manufacturers are expected to introduce location-tracking systems in the United States as early as this fall. Once the standards for location-tracking technology are set, Neoku plans to automatically map and dispatch targeted messages to registered users based on where they're standing -- whether it's a Taco Bell in downtown Cleveland or a riverbank in Ireland.
"The big question for the industry is, 'What is the role of community in wireless networks?'" Bain said. "Are we all just subscribers on the same virtual network who don't interact with each other, or are we neighbors living together in real-world communities?"
But like any community application, the success of Neoku's service will depend on attracting a critical mass of users to take advantage of it.
Critics of the wireless Web say the tiny keypads and screens of handheld devices make them unsuitable for text-based communication.
And what's more, allowing users to post whatever they wish raises pressing liability questions for Neoku and for any company that might license its service.
Two years ago, a company called Third Voice launched a Web plug-in that allowed users to post their comments on the face of any Web page, provoking angry resistance from an army of Web hosts who called it "Web graffiti."
On Monday, the company finally discontinued its service because of a failure to generate ad revenue.
"You've got to be kidding about that," Eng-Siong Tan, founder of Third Voice, said about Neoku's wireless Web graffiti plan.
"It's all well and good to promote free speech, but if you're going to run a business, you need to figure out how you're going to pay for this," Tan added.
Tan also said that in a community application like Neoku's, the signal-to-noise ratio could be a problem, with users spamming each other with inane comments. "If you leave it open, it's going to go to the lowest common denominator," Tan said.
But Bain and Neidich are unfazed, and say they hope people will use HaikuHaiku in ways its developers never anticipated.
During the beta test of HaikuHaiku, a user named "arcana" at 23rd and Mission streets in San Francisco's Mission District was inspired to write:
"Dot com wireless
internet startup etailer
blah blah blah blah blah"
