As of today, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered mobile phone companies to filter its list of 1,600 "offensive and obscene" words, according to AFP. Many of the words are in fact obscene. But a ridiculous number seem to have been copied off English language t-shirts spotted in the Tokyo subway.

Updated after the jump.

1. Axing the weasel
2. Butch babes
3. Clamdigger
4. Creamy
5. Cyberslimer
6. Dome
7. Finger food
8. Floggin the dolphin
9. Four 20
10. Glazed donut
11. Hobo
12. Hoser
13. Ingin
14. Kmart
15. Kumquat
16. Lady boog
17. Oui
18. Purina princess
19. Smack daddy
20. Stagg

Here's a (via Gawker) much larger list of the offending, and baffling, words and phrases.

The many, many ways that this can screw up texting in Pakistan (aside from really tongue balling the dixie dikes who want to giehn one another) is to appreciably slow down delivery of messages, slow down the system as a whole, filter the wrong messages and get companies and people in legal trouble based on a typo or (almost certain) misunderstanding.

Congratulations, Pakistani Telecommunications Authority. You're really a bunch of butchbabes.

Updated: OpenNet Initiative reports that Pakistani ISPs have pushed back en masse against the PTA's orders. They had until today to comply.

"Pakistani mobile operators today said they would defer implementing the list until they receive further clarification from the PTA. The government agency released the list on November 14, promptly receiving heavy criticism globally on the country's first attempt to censor text messaging."

Photo by iMorpheus

Back in 2006, when I spoke at a State Department-sponsored conference on social media and democracy, the only group of governmental participants open to social media, and already using it, were the military. They were subscribing to RSS feeds, including search feeds, reading and commenting on blogs and participating on forums. So there is precedence for reaching out on social media sites.

"We're working hard to increase our social media. We fully recognize that young people TiVo over commercials or are multitasking on their smartphones when the commercials come on...We have to reach out in forms like we're discussing to get them to want to know more, to join us in social media and extend the dialog."

The branding message remains consistent, if not terribly clear to me: "Army Strong." It plays out across a number of properties, including a website, Army Strong Stories, and a Go Army Facebook page (complete with exclusive X-Men movie footage).

Army Strong Stories is built like a blog, with a column of posts by various Army officers, links and video. There is an iPhone app you can download as well.

The cross-platform messaging includes a dedicated YouTube channel, a Twitter account and even a MySpace page. (Really?)

Like the Army or not, embracing social media is simple common sense for people whose "product" as it were, only sells itself to a small group. The rest need to see themselves in the Army to begin considering it as an option. Given the primacy of personal communications media in the lives of young people, no such appeal would be possible for long without it.

My question, however, is how energetic the recruiters are in engaging on an ongoing way with the users of social media. The PR command I dealt with were very energetic participants. It is uncertain whether the recruiting command is. And that will be, I think, the make-or-break in the long run.

For those who grew up before the era of mobile phones, these type of "mom  and dad are your Big Brother" services may strike you as a bit disconcerting with the level of access they provide. But for mobile operators and the service providers, that access has proved both valuable in retaining customers, as well as quite lucrative (to the tune of a $50 billion personal securities market, no less.)

According to the CEO of one such service provider, Tasso Roumeliotis, founder and CEO of Location Labs, there's a high willingness to pay for "Family Locator" services like AT&T's FamilyMap, T-Mobile's FamilyWhere and Sprint's Family Locator, for example.

Carriers like selling such services, too. When a mobile operator is able to convert an account to a family plan, it reduces its churn rate by 75%, Roumeliotis says. Currently, 65% of subscribers in the U.S. are on this type of plan. Within this market, there are now millions of users who are happy to pay for Family Locator solutions at a cost of $5 to $15 dollars per month, generally speaking.

While there's much debate over the future of location-based "checkin" services like Silicon Valley darling Foursquare or Facebook's Places, there's no question that families are finding the real value of location-based services in tracking their family members' movements. To put these numbers in perspective, Roumeliotis says there were more "paid-for locates" last year than there were Foursquare checkins. And according to Foursquare's own data, there were 381,576,305 checkins in 2010, to give you an idea.

Parental Controls and Access Baked Into Handsets

But while location-based tracking and alerts (child arrives at school, spouse left the office) have been available for some time, other types of services are now on their way to users' handsets, too.

Location Labs is now providing solutions that address the texting-while-driving problem, via partnerships with both Sprint and T-Mobile at present, and more are on the way. Unlike smartphone applications, these services reside deep in the phone's firmware and cannot simply be switched off by closing an app or turning off GPS. Instead, the service, provided by Location Labs' security platform called "Sparkle," works by using APIs (application programming interfaces) that provide developers access to location, velocity plus controls for data, voice and text. And it works on both smartphones (iPhone, Android and BlackBerry) and select feature phones (Brew Mobile for now).

In addition to being able to track where a family member is located, or turn off the ability for someone to text while the car is in motion, this service also provides access to other data and activity taking place on the device. For parents, this means that they'll soon be able to observe and control more aspects of how their children are using their phones.

Parents will be able to preview photos before they leave the device, read the content of text messages, stop kids from downloading apps or games, restrict Web searches, restrict when apps or other features of the phone can and cannot be used, whitelist or blacklist specific applications, restrict who can contact kids (and vice versa) and much more.

And unlike some of the Internet "net nanny" solutions from days past, those being tracked on their mobiles are never unaware. The service sends out messages at intermittent (but for security reasons, random) intervals, alerting users that they are being located or monitored.

While these advanced features are not available on phones today, their arrival is just around the corner. Location Labs says it will make an announcement related to this technology in Q3 2011 involving at least one major carrier here in the U.S. And in two years time, says Roumeliotis, ubiquitous parental controls like this will be the norm on all carriers.

The increasing use of text-messaging by teens - and increasingly often, by younger children - has given some people cause for concern. They argue that the abbreviations used in texting are detrimental to literacy development. Spelling, grammar, phrasing - these are all somehow poised to suffer, critics of texting contend, because of the use of shortened words and sentences. Soon, they predict, students' essays will be filled with LOLs and L8Rs.

But a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children's literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or "textisms" may actually aid reading, writing and spelling skills.

Better Spelling Through Texting?

Based on a series of reading and spelling tests, researchers found a "significant contribution of textism use to the children's spelling development during the study." The study made it clear that it wasn't the access to the phone per se, or even the text-messaging as much as specifically the use of textisms that aided the development. The reason, writes Dr. Clare Wood, one of the authors of the study, "is partly explained by the highly phonetic nature of the textisms that are popular within this age group, as the phonological and alphabetic awareness that is required for the construction and decoding of these textisms also underpin successful reading development."

It's also possible, the researchers add, that textisms add value because they are "another way in which students are exposed to print outside of school." And while sure, it's not the same as having students exposed to "great works of literature" on the weekends, it looks like texting is a good influence nonetheless.

The number of adults who use text messaging has gone up steadily over the last few years. While 65% of adults in the U.S. were sending and receiving text messages in 2009, this number is now up to 72%.

A lot of Texting is About Location Sharing

When adults use text messaging, they mostly do so to say hello and chat (34%) and to report where they are and where someone else is (24%). Given how important location is for a lot of these usage patterns, we would think that there has to be a big market for location services (like EchoEcho) that make private location sharing between cell phones easy.

More Statistics about Adult Cell Phone Usage

• 82% of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone (83% of all men, 81% of all women)
• women make slightly fewer calls with their cell phones than men
• 65% of adults say they have ever slept with their cell phone on or right next to their bed (and 90% of younger adults - who probably also use their phones as alarm clocks - say they have done so)
• 42% feel irritated when a call or text interrupts them
• 57% of adults with cell phones say that they have received unwanted or spam text messages (what exactly constitutes an "unwanted" text message isn't clear in Pew's question, however)

Logo used courtesy of Flickr user Dan Zen.

When going out to eat, there's nothing worse than being told the wait time is 45 - 60 minutes and the restaurant is so over-crowded with customers that you can't even make your way to the bar. Unfortunately, the only choice customers have today is to crowd in and bear it since the paging systems used by restaurants have such a limited range. This is especially trying when you're at a restaurant that's in a mall plaza where other shops, bars, or coffeehouses are only steps away. But instead of being able to kill time in the bookstore, for example, customers have to wait, bored and crowded, in the restaurant's entry way.

ReadyPing solves this problem and does so without the need for restaurants to invest in additional hardware or software. Instead, the system allows for text messages to be sent to the waiting dinner guests. To use the system, a host or hostess enters in the party's name, number of guests, and a mobile number. When a table becomes available, the host clicks a button to send out a customized text message.

The cost of using the system is a flat $34.95 per month for unlimited messaging and there are no setup fees. At the moment, ReadyPing is U.S.-only, but there's no reason why they couldn't expand to other parts of the world at a later point.

Potential Issues

There is a potential drawback to using a system like this - and that's the restaurant customers themselves. Given free range, people will likely wander off much farther away from the restaurant than before and that could delay the time between the text's delivery and their return by several minutes, possibly even five or ten. This would dramatically slow down the seating process and would frustrate those on the list behind them.

Before a restaurant implemented such a system as this, it would be necessary to retrain hosting staff so they understood the potential issues. Perhaps instead of waiting until a table was actually ready before alerts were sent, ReadyPing users could anticipate ahead of time that a table was about to become ready. This would give customers the additional time needed to return to the restaurant from wherever they had ventured off to. Perhaps staff could even work out a system where awaiting customers were pinged as current customers were brought their checks. Further integration with restaurant POS systems to do so would be even better, but something like that may be beyond ReadyPing's capabilities.

Another potential drawback to ReadyPing is that some customers would be hesitant to give out their phone number, despite assurances that data is secured. For those customers, backup pagers may still need to be used or they may need to wait the old-fashioned way - listening for the hostess to call their name aloud.

Real-World Mobile Technology

In any event, the ReadyPing system is a great example of an application that solves a real-world problem which so many of us can relate to. Thanks to mobile technology, we expect to see more everyday, useful solutions like this in the near future.

We had always heard, anecdotally, that the only reason teens today would even bother signing up for an email account was so they could register with social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. However, 36% of those surveyed said they use email alerts to stay on top of what's happening on the social networks. In other words, they don't just create emails to sign up - the emails actually become a part of how they interact with the networks they join.

When it came time to pick their email provider, Gmail was the clear favorite. Nearly one-third (32%) of college students choose Gmail, while 19% use Yahoo, 18% use MSN/Hotmail and about 17% use their school email.

How Often They Check the Inbox

Students also regularly check their email inboxes. More than two-thirds of students say they check email at least once per day, and 55% of those check more than 3 times per day. This is especially interesting when you compare this data to that that came out of the Pew Internet Project (PDF) only a few months ago. In that study, Pew found that half of corporate employees checked their email constantly, while only 32% of those who work in small businesses did.

Comparing those numbers with the data on the students seems to imply that the only people who become email-obsessed are those for whom email is the major, and sometimes only, form of communication. That's definitely the case in big corporations where the people you need to speak to are buildings, cities, states, or even half a world away. For everyone else, there are other alternatives. In small businesses, for example, there are probably more chances to have face-to-face time. For the students there are social networks and, of course, text messaging.

Mobile Communications

Only 12% of students currently check email on their mobile, but eROI predicts that number will increase quickly, especially given the recent explosion of smartphones on the market. In the meantime, though, it's text messaging that remains supreme with 37% selecting that as their preferred method of communication. Email is second at 26% followed by social networking IM (15%) , IM (11%), and social networking email (11%). We're also surprised to see social networking networking email rated last - we always imagined students using social networks more for communication purposes. Then again, it appears that the survey neglected to ask about Wall posts and profile comments - those are also important ways to communicate. We wonder where they would have fit in.

In the end, the survey finds that students do use email - perhaps even more than we realized - but if you really want to reach them, you should do it via text or IM. For marketers, this means that the easy method of sending out newsletters and coupons to mass email lists may become a thing of the past - only 16% of students read marketing email. Companies will have to come up with new ways to to advertise to this demographic. May we suggest social media?