Yes, this definitely can be used for practical jokes(which some may enjoy and others not, but either way it's something both parties will talk about). Practical jokes aside, we have used Sleep.FM' Social Alarm Clock to send...
- Happy Birthday alarm messages - Messages detailing an important meeting has moved to an earlier time - My colleague's cousin in Iraq being awakened by his kids alarm messages - My friends(newlyweds) who have different sleep schedules waking each other up
The Social Alarm Clock has been wrapped around a modern concept(a social network), one that allows users to regulate who sends them alarm messages, as well as upload alarm message to their Sleep.FM friends. As a social network there more ways to monetize users, as if you look at lone applications like Skype and Twitter they are challenged in this regards!
I think there are some ways you could adapt this to be more viable but in its current form it just really isn't going to work. If you want to go forward with this idea, I would recommend widget'izing it, this is one function that would be more useful integrated into an existing social network.
Also, I don't think very many people have a computer sitting next to them to use as an alarm clock.
I have a friend who doesn't keep track of anything, and relies on his girlfriend to tell him when to do what. Whether this is a good way to go about a relationship is debatable, I can see how you'd set alarms for people to do something because it's important to you, rather than the person executing it. Say like, "pick up groceries at 5pm", but send it at 5pm so he has no excuse not to remember.
Happy birthdays wishes. "hey how did the date go?" messages right after your friend's date. "how did that pitch go?" messages after your colleague got devoured by VC's. What's in common is that you sent the message at the time you remembered, and they received it at a time when it's relevant to them, while you might be out golfing at the time. You can seem thoughtful at the moment it's relevant to the receiver of the alarm message, and when it's convenient to you.
Or you can send messages to your future self (say 5 years later), so you'd get messages from your past self saying, "this is what I want to do by the time I'm your age. Have you done them yet?" Or you send friends messages later on saying "I was really mad that you ate my ice cream last sat, but I was too shy to say anything at the time."
I think it's probably worth exploring what you can do with asynchronous messages that don't get delivered immediately, cuz that's essentially what it is. Limiting it to just messages you can send for waking is limiting, but perhaps not as easy to sell to people otherwise.
While widgetizing it is one way to go, I think this best fits on a mobile app of some sort. Mobile devices are seen as personal extensions of self. This sort of thing falls under that category.
We definitely are aware of of other uses of The Social Alarm and will be detailing that in a presentation on Tuesday.
There are a ton of things to be done by meshing the alarm clock(or an audio alert system if you prefer to classify it as such) with the Internet. We plan on implementing a lot more to this concept!
Again, thank you everyone for your comments and honesty!
Why does an alarm clock have to be a social networking site? This seems to be a rather utilitarian thing that works perfectly fine via the multiple alarm clocks I already own. All of my friends would use a service like this to mess with me, if I gave them privileges to wake me up. I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to abuse it if the roles were reversed.