American Idol - All that is wrong with US SMS

Forgive Asian and European audiences of American Idol shows for thinking that the Americans don't really know how to use SMS.

Here's the voting pedagogy for American Idol: If you like Chris Sligh, send "Vote" to 5455. If you like Phil Stacey, send "Vote to 5456, if you like Blake Lewis, send "Vote" to 5457 etc (or something like that).

Err...ok, but it gets pretty tricky to remember the SMS destination numbers, especially since week after week, as candidates get voted off, new numbers would have to be reassigned. One almost needs to have a pen and paper at hand week-on-week to vote for one's Idol. (Fact that I can't exactly remember the finer details of American Idol's voting pedagogy just proves my point that its completely not memorable).

Ask any pimply adolescent mobile "engineer" in downtown Kuala Lumpur about the most effective pedagogy for voting. "Easy-lah" (as they say in Kuala Lumpur), "just stick to one SMS destination number e.g. 5555, and then just text your idol's name to that number."

"Or alternatively, you can assign candidates an alphabet e.g. A,B, C or numbers1,2,3 and get audiences to text that alphabet/number to that single SMS destination number."

Interesting that when I was working at Maxis, a Malaysian mobile operator, I noticed that Fremantle Media, licensor of local Idol competitions, insisted that their Malaysian franchisee to do SMS voting the US way. Not sure whether in the end we did voting the US way, but as it turned out, the SMS voting portion of Malaysian Idol bombed, being far eclipsed by a rival show, Akademi Fantasia, which had over 10 times more SMS votes casted.