3jam to be used to provide safe ride service for fraternities?
Posted by andy, April 20th, 2006
A few days ago I got a call from Tyler who is in a fraternity at a university in Florida. He had read about us on a blog, and wanted to talk about a new way to use 3jam. His fraternity’s national hq wants them to set up a safe ride program, and 3jam is a perfect solution!
The idea is to sign up everyone in the house for 3jam. Then every Thursday, Friday and Saturday the night’s safe ride numbers are sent out via 3jam. Messages might be broken down by pledge class, so the list doesn’t get to big. This way, not only can people easily stay in touch, they have the safe ride number stored in their phone and one click access to get a ride home.
Tyler had some other great questions too:
Hi Andy,
I’ve added a bunch of friends and started playing with 3Jam. Really awesome stuff. Everyone I’ve shown it to has been blown away.
This morning, I sat down with our advisor from HQ and I gave him a demo and now he’s gotten started using the services. In fact, he wants to start using it with some of his team members from headquarters. However, he had one question for me to relay to you:
what is the maximum number of people could have in one chat? And I was also wondering if is possible yet to create groups?Also, I was thinking a really cool feature that you could incorporate, would be the option to add contacts who are not on your contact list, but you have been involved in one or more 3jam chat sessions with.
Thanks!
Tyler
Currently, we don’t limit the number of people you can have on a group text chat. But there are some practical limitations. Text messages can only have 160 characters, so each extra person means there is slightly less room for the actual message. Also, the same way it is annoying to have someone ‘reply-to-all’ on a large email distribution list, it’s annoying to get on a group text chat with too many people. We’ve found that group text messages with 3 to 5 people in them work best. But we don’t limit you…so use it the way you think it works best! That said, keep in mind we have safeguards for abuse…and we will terminate any account that is spamming.
The answer to Tyler’s second question is that, yes, we do have group capabilities in 3jam…but they will be administered through the web interface (which will be available soon).
And being able to request to add people who aren’t in your contact list but you’ve been on a chat with is a great idea…and also coming soon!
We look forward to working with Tyler to help make 3jam work better for his fraternity. If you are in a fraternity or sorority and have ideas or questions about how you can use 3jam for your house, leave a comment or email me at andy [at] 3jam dot com.
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