World AIDS Day: find HIV testing sites by SMS

December 1st is World AIDS Day, established by The World Health Organization in 1988. Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation announced the new short code KNOWIT (566948) for locating HIV testing sites. Text your zip code to KNOWIT and you'll get a response back with nearby testing sites.

For example, I tried sending the text "10173" (a Manhattan zip code) to 566948, and got back the response:

    Testing Center: New York University School of Medicine
    and Hospitals Center (212) 263-6426. More locations
    call 1-800-232-4636.

This sounds like a good way to discreetly and easily find a testing location. It's a good resource that people should be made aware of.

Price comparison by SMS

Several companies offer price comparison checking by SMS (e.g. Google SMS), but the price comparison website AuctionShark has something different going for it: it also checks eBay for active auctions selling the product you're looking for.

So for example, say you're out at Radio Shack looking at the Tomtom 510 GPS receiver, which maybe they have on sale for $325. If you're not sure if Radio Shack is giving you a good deal, you could send the text message "tomtom 510 gps" to the email address price@auctionshark.com. In a few minutes you'd get back a text message that said something like,

    Tomtom GO 510 GPS ...
    Comparemaster.com $345.00
    eBay $204.95 - No Bids ends in 1h 6m
    Reply m for more, e to email

So now you know that the Radio Shack price is cheaper than what you might find online, but that if you hurry you could also get the GPS on eBay potentially cheaper (in an auction that ends in just over an hour). Another neat feature is that if you respond with "e", you'll be prompted to enter your email address so that you can get the listings sent to you by email for later reference.

AuctionShark is pretty cool, but has two minor problems: the first is that they seem to truncate the item name, which in many cases makes it unclear whether or not their system interpreted your search correctly. For example, if you had entered "Tomtom 510", the response message would start with:

    Tomtom Tom Tom ...

Which, according to their web site, is an appreviation for "Tomtom Tom Tom RDS-TMC Traffic Receiver (9V00.080)". Since the information isn't useful at all unless you're completely sure what product you're getting info about, it seems that AuctionShark shouldn't be abbreviating the product name, even if it turns out to be pretty long.

The second problem with their service is that they require you to send a text message to an email address, instead of to a short code, which is non-standard, has a slower response time, and requires more typing.

But other than those two quips, AuctionShark should prove useful if you want to know if you can get a product you're about to buy cheaper online.

Google SMS

For my inaugural post, I thought I'd talk about Google's free SMS service. It's actually been around for a while, but I'm always surprised that so few people seem to know about it. From any cell phone, you can send a text message request to Google's short code GOOGLE (i.e. the phone number 466453, corresponding to G-O-O-G-L-E on a standard phone keypad), and you'll get back an automated text message in a few seconds with an answer to your request. Google has a lot of info available, including yellow pages, movie listings, flight status, translations, and a lot more.

For example, to find the nearest Anna's Taqueria in Boston (if you don't already know their locations by heart...) you could send the text message

    02139 anna's taqueria

to the phone number 466453 (GOOGLE). In a few seconds, you should get the text message response,

    Local Listings:
    Anna's Taqueria
    84 Massachusetts Ave
    617-324-2662

Very handy. And for many of the things Google offers this is way faster than trying to browse the web on your phone (I've actually done this speed test a couple of times with my friends who have iPhones, which btw are nonetheless very cool).

There are a few downsides to Google's service. First, it's pretty tough to remember the info they offer, and not all of their features are listed when you text "help" or "tips" to GOOGLE (though the complete list is available on the web). So sometimes you just have to send off a text message request and hope for the best. A second problem is that location-based services (e.g. yellow pages) can't handle anything too sophisticated, e.g. "starbucks 28th and 5th nyc". Looking for the nearest Starbucks in New York City by zip code is pretty much pointless.

All in all, Google's SMS service is a very useful way to find info when you're out and about (though I mainly use it for address lookups). And since its free, its a short code thats definitely worth remembering.