Why choose Multi-Media Messaging?
MMS is not very frequently used in most projects we come across. Most mobile projects focused on social development use primarily SMS, WAP browsing, the Internet, and even voice-based applications. However, the Vozmob team uses MMS heavily. They have even written software to take a set of pictures audio and captions to make up soundslides in their blogposts (see an example here–click on the picture to see the slideshow). So I asked Sasha why VozMob chose to use MMS as one of its primary phone technologies. Vozmob, true to good participatory design principles conducted extensive user surveys. The team looked at what phones, what plans, and what kinds of non-mobile Internet access the laborers had. Seeing mostly voice-based usage (only 31% sent texts), the team proceeded to build an audio-blogging system accessible by simply calling a number. They used a simple voicemail-based system which they could access from Drupal through email, with minimal effort. But soon after, users asked how
