Author: navin

TRAI’s new SMS guidelines are a step in the wrong direction

Starting today, TRAI has started enforcing new guidelines with the intention of stopping the menace of “promotional” SMS, or SMS spam. No promotional SMS can be sent to any user who is on the DND list, and there are hefty fines for violations. Everyone is rejoicing the death of SMS spam, but this is a huge backward step for India – because along with SMS spam, TRAI has also outlawed the sending of automated SMS to users with their permission. That’s right: there is no way for a company X to send a status update to user Y even if the user Y desperately wants such updates, and even if he’s willing to give it in writing.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate unsolicited SMS messages as much as you do. But what TRAI has done is throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If I book a ticket on http://BookMyShow.com, I used to get an SMS confirmation. I could use that SMS at the theatre to pick up my ticket. Now? Gone. If a doctor answers an important patient question on http://bharathealth.com, the patient would get an SMS with the doctor’s answer (so that they get the answer immediately, and not have to wait until they log in to the site next time). This is a service that the patients love, and they start complaining as soon as the SMS service stops working. Now? It’s illegal. The fact that the receiver of the SMS actually wants it does not matter. SMS from http://Flipkart.com telling me where my book has reached – Gone. SMS updates that tell me whether my waitlisted Indian Railways ticket’s status has gotten confirmed – Gone.

Here are the sordid details as I understand them:

Automated SMS can be divided up into two categories: promotional/bulk SMS, and transactional SMS. Bulk SMS is where you’re sending the same SMS to a large number of recipients (e.g. a daily stock tip would be in this category). Transactional SMS is when you’re sending different sms updates/alerts/messages to different customers (e.g. an sms update from your bank immediately after a high value transaction on your credit card).

According to the new regulations, here is my understanding of the effects:

  • Users can sign up for a full DND (in which you don’t get any bulk SMS), or a partial DND, where you can opt in to receive bulk sms in certain categories. There are 7 such categories: 1: Banking/Insurance/Finance, 2: Real Estate, 3: Education, 4: Health, 5: Consumer Goods, Automobiles, 6: Communications/Broadcasting/Entertainment/IT, 7: Tourism & Leisure
  • Any user signin up for partial DND is pretty much asking the world of spammers (in that category) to start spamming him/her. Imagine – the partial DND list will be a public available list of people who have indicated an interest in a particular category and cannot complian if you spam them. A marketer’s (aka spammer’s) dream. As we say in Hindi, this is pretty much aa bail mujhe maar.
  • For DND users, transactional SMS can be sent only by: Banks, Financial Institutions, Insurance Companies, Credit Card Companies, Railways or Airline companies, and registered Educational Institutions. That’s it. No one else can send any SMS to a user signed up for DND.
  • Everybody else will essentially be treated as a telemarketer and be fined heavily in case of DND violations.

So, imagine you provide stock tips via SMS to users you have opted in to your service (what the heck, they’re even paying you for it). Under the new regulations:

  • No, you are not a Financial Institution just because you’re providing finance information. So you can’t send transactional
  • Under the new regulations, you cannot send your SMS to any user on the DND.
  • Your only hope is to convince that user to sign up for a partial-DND and opt in to receive messages for category #1: banking/insurance/finance. I would assume that most users who’ve signed up for DND will be wary of opening themselves up to telemarketing by going the partial DND route.

Follow a discussion of this question on Quora for more.

Also see Sagar Bedmutha’s post on pluggd.in on this topic.

“Crowdsourcing” means that the project originator does all the work

In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), I found this great quote by him. He is talking about something that people very commonly get completely wrong when creating an open-source or crowdsourcing project:

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

I have some experience with this, because 3-1/2 years ago, I made the same mistake. I started PuneTech with the naive belief that if I start a wiki with the purpose of creating a knowledgebase about all interesting technology in Pune, people would contribute to it and it would become a great crowdsourced resource. In reality, what happened is that I got lots of encouragement and thanks, but few actual contributions. I ended up doing most of the work myself. After a few months, Amit Paranjape joined the effort. But, by and large, the fact remained that most of the content had to come from me.

It is only now, after going at it for 3-1/2 years that people have started contributing more substantially. Vivek Shrinivasan and Meher Ranjan are actively updating the PuneTech YouTube Channel. Mayank Jain is creating the PICT PuneTech Group.

Moral of the story – when you start some new initiative in the hope that it will become a community activity, then be prepared to do all the work yourself for the first few years, and only then will it become a community activity.

Wiio’s Law: Communication usually fails, except by accident

Just found this interesting set of laws, called Wiio’s laws:

  1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
    • If communication can fail, it will.
    • If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails.
    • If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding.
    • If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails.
  2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
  3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
  4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
    • The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
  5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
  6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
  7. The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.

And there are three corollaries by Korpela:

  1. If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through
  2. Search for information fails, except by accident
  3. Give the student a chance to realize he misunderstood it all

These are all taken from this blog post.

At this time, I don’t have any thing else to add to these laws. But I’m sure that in the years to come, I am going to quote Wiio’s laws #1 and #2, and Korpela’s corollary #1 repeatedly to people. (Just like I love to quote the Three Chinese Curses:

  • Third Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times
  • Second Chinese curse: May you come to the attention of important people
  • First (and most dangerous) Chinese curse: May you get what you wish for

And this concludes my first ever parenthetical remark which has a bullet list embedded in it (And also concludes this blog post))