racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I hate it when software or web apps bring up error messages that are irrelevant and most likely untrue. It’s as if they’re treating the user as stupid people!

Check out this message from Chikka messenger, for instance:

Please wait for [name] to reply to at least 1 of your messages. Once your friend replies (at least once), you can continue sending him more messages. This is a new anti-spam feature to protect our community members such as yourself.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t believe this crap, and I’m pretty sure most other Chikka users don’t, too. This is not an anti-spam feature, but instead a measure to make sure Chikka earns revenues. They don’t want your correspondents to reply directly to your mobile phone (and hence forego paying more than twice the per-SMS charge, half of which goes to Chikka).

Note that Chikka has a feature that allows mobile phone users to selectively block PC users from sending SMS.

There’s nothing wrong with earning a few bucks off mobile users (which translate to millions daily from my country, the “SMS capital of the world”). But I think Chikka should have been more honest and straightforward in their error message.  Something along the lines of the following would have been more reasonable:

Sending SMS to your friends via Chikka messenger is free. However, for us to sustain our operations, we also need to earn a living. Since we get a share from the telco’s revenue for each message sent from a cellphone to Chikka, we would require that your correspondent reply to at least one of your messages for him/her to continue receiving SMS from you. We have already notified him/her of this. Thank you for your understanding.

Now isn’t that better?

By the way, my latest post on Pinoy.tech.blog is about Chikka now having interconnectivity with Sun Cellular.  Check it out.

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