A couple weeks ago, I read about a Google Art App for the cell phone. You take a picture of yourself, and the search engine looks for artwork that resembles you and gives you thumbnails. You choose the one you think resembles you best, and it generates your picture side-by-side with the art.
I wound up with some Renaissance-era painting of an aristocrat who had the same hair and beard color as me, but otherwise didn’t look anything like me. Still, I decided to use the Share feature and picked about 10 names from my IM list. I didn’t realize this would create a group chat.
A few days later, my pal JM sent me a text, but didn’t realize he’s in group chat. I posted “You’re in group chat bro. Send directly to me.”
JM is bi-polar and tends to go apeshit and panic when confronted with a weird situation. “What are you talking about? How did I get into this? I thought we were having a private conversation. I’m not drunk. I only had one martini.”
I started laughing and tried to type instructions to him, but he kept putting in new panic texts. In the meantime, the other people in the chat group were saying “This is an interesting conversation” and “Hahahahaha.” Then I posted “Use your go back key. I don’t know how you do it on the iPhone hehe.” (I use an Android) He got more upset and angry at me and I couldn’t help but laugh so hard I was unable to text. He also got pissed at me for typing “hehe” which made me laugh more.
Finally I thought to back out and send him a text directly so he could respond to it and not group chat. Gawd, he was pissed. He called me last night and cussed me some more about it. I told him nobody in group chat knew who he was, so he didn’t have to worry.
Ha! I’d be into it if someone had a meltdown in a semi-anonymous group chat. It’d make for some very good entertainment (as long as it ended by bedtime).
I hope it makes sense in retrospect, at least. It would have been predictable if you’d thought about it, but most folks don’t. That’s why “Reply All” has been the bane of e-mail since the 1970s.
As far as I know, there’s no “Blind Carbon Copy” equivalent for SMS/MMS, which would have addressed distinct messages to individual recipients, but I can see why it’s not implemented. 10 “BCC” text messages has to be 10 distinct SMS messages, and no operator wants it to be so easy to flood their networks with a storm of SMS traffic. (i.e., “spamming” in most technical and generic sense.) The single MMS with multiple recipients is much more network efficient.
There is, kind of. Somewhere in the options will be one to send group messages individually. Which as you suggest, renders multiple copies of the message being sent out.
That’s true. It’s also usually a deeply-buried and poorly-documented option, defaulting to MMS (true multiple addressee). Probably because it’s more efficient on the network.
Nothing about pictures there. Could have all been short-circuited in a 30-second conversation. Instead, someone who “tends to go apeshit and panic when confronted with a weird situation” is immersed in an even weirder situation and ends up humiliated.
huh, on my phone (android) I’m given the option of group or individual messages for each time I do mass messaging, default is set to individual. weird, must be a clone thing?
Before you get too excited, it’s not available in Illinois and Texas. Google won’t say why, but there is speculation that it is because of laws in both states that prohibit collection of biometric data without explicit consent.