An AP headline in our local Sunday paper caught my attention this week: “Human help fuels ChaCha” (your headline may vary). On January 3rd, the ChaCha search engine added a text-message search service where human “guides” answer questions via SMS. Sound familiar? All you have to do is send your text message to 242242 (CHACHA), and in an average of 3 minutes your question will be answered via text by one of 500 people online fielding the ChaCha text queries. For now the service is free; later the company plans to charge $5 - $10 a month after the first 10 questions. The AP review and others report that humans do a much better job of answering questions like finding recipes or the best thin-crust pizza within a 10 block radius. Follow-up questions now include the previous thread, so context can be continued from one question to the next. On the other hand, a couple of TechCrunch reviews are less favorable, pointing out issues of scalability, ChaChaSpam, and the costs of text messaging.

Libraries have been using SMS reference services for quite a few years, and although the technology isn’t new, text messaging continues to grow. Almost 2 years ago, Amanda said … “as long as usage grows and as long we we can see it sticking around for the forseeable future, we should be offering the service. In closing: 500 billion messages a year, why aren’t we there? ” We still aren’t there, but I’m curious about how SMS growth has impacted existing library text services, and whether text messaging is working up to a critical mass. I have some other questions… Do library users really want to text message librarians and how much they would be willing to pay on their mobile phone plan to do so? What kinds of information make the most sense over SMS - quick facts, directions, what else? Is setting up SMS reference still just a bit trickier than figuring out how to use Meebo? If barriers like cost and set-up are lowered, would SMS take off as IM reference service has? If you’ve experimented with SMS reference services, would you share your experiences and thoughts?