Sweethearting : A Ping for the One I Love

Jason Kottke has a cool idea : Sweethearting:

Here’s a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to “ping” someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.

in part 2 Jason mentions SMS.

here’s my idea of how this might work:

the “easiest” way to do something like this would be if you could store/save a SMS message and destination.

for example
#4 send a text msg “Gone 2 Lunch “to the phone number of my wife
and #5 “Back from Lunch”
and of course #69 “call me when you can” to my mistress’s phone number….(just kidding)

so 2 keys # and a number – plus maybe a confirm? – and I have a set of
quick ping messages.

Doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to implement it on top of a celphone standard SMS service.

Questions :

Do any of the texting services allow anything like this?
could you write, and install on your own cel anything like this?
and how to get a service to implement anything like this?

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