Pogue Speaks

PopularityDialer Goes Offline

By DAVID POGUE

Over a decade ago, I remember seeing a "Saturday Night Live" skit that still stays with me. It was a talk show where all of the guests had one thing in common: they were all jerks or psychopaths whose one-time actions had created lifelong inconvenience for the rest of society. There was that guy who put poison into a bottle of Tylenol, initiating the era of the childproof (and adult-proof) package. There was the hijacker, whose actions led to the nationwide construction of airport X-ray machines. And so on.

I thought of that this week when I learned what happened to one of my favorite Web sites: PopularityDialer.com.

It's an absolutely delicious concept. You plug in your cellphone number. At a date and time you specify, your phone rings. That's it. No charge.

It's a perfect way to give yourself an out when you plan to be on a date, in a meeting or anywhere else where you might need an excuse to get away—or to demonstrate your own popularity.

Better yet: You know how sometimes the person next to you can faintly overhear the person you're talking to? For that reason, when you set up a time and date for your call, you can also specify what you want to hear on the other end. You have a choice of five prerecorded "caller on the other end" one-way conversations, so that you can have a plausible chat. There's the boss ("This is Mr. Johnson calling from the office. Did you complete that thing, about a month ago? That photocopier training?"), the girlfriend call ("Hey, you, what's going on? I'm going out later. You should come!"), and so on.

In one of my talks, I explore the way the Internet and the phone have been merging in fascinating ways. And I always demo Popularity Dialer, setting it up to "interrupt" me during the talk itself. It's hilarious.

Until a few weeks ago. I pulled up the site for the demo—and found a note that it was down for "maintenance."

When the site didn't come back for several weeks, I e-mailed the creators, Jenny Chowdhury and Cory Forsyth, who built PopularityDialer as college students. Jenny wrote to explain the sad news: Some idiot had set up an unwanted PopularityDialer call to an F.C.C. lawyer. Next thing Jenny new, her site was served with a ludicrous citation:

"This is an official CITATION, issued pursuant to section 503(b)(5) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (the Act), 47 U.S.C. § (503)(b)(5), for violations of the Act and Federal Communications Commission's rules that govern telephone solicitations and unsolicited advertisements."

Ms. Chowdhury and Mr. Forsyth had to take PopularityDialer offline.

The whole thing is absurd on so many levels.

* PopularityDialer doesn't advertise or solicit anything.

* PopularityDialer has always offered a place to list your number if you don't want to receive its calls.

* Plenty of other Web sites offer services that call you at a specified time. Most of them are wake-up services, like iPing.com, TelePixie.com, Wakeupland.com, Snoozester.com, and so on. All of them offer exactly the same risk of abuse as PopularityDialer. You could use any of them to set up a wake-up call to an F.C.C. lawyer, too. PopularityDialer just happened to be the unlucky victim of an anonymous jerk.

It gets weirder. When Ms. Chowdhury and Mr. Forsyth contacted the F.C.C. to get an explanation for the citation, the F.C.C. minion who responded was equally baffled. "I don't see how a Web site falls within the jurisdiction of the F.C.C. or how it would cause T.C.P.A. violations," went the reply. "We would not give any advice on how to legally continue the operation of your business. That would have to come from your own attorney."

So let me get this straight: The same F.C.C. that sent the citation has no idea why it sent the citation?

Ms. Chowdhury and Mr. Forsyth have appealed the citation. Let's hope that sanity prevails, and that one of the Internet's cleverest and wittiest gems is brought back to life—soon.

Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com