It's Saturday afternoon and Josh has some downtime so he's laying back on the couch watching some football. He's not particularly interested in the result so he's got his IM open on his laptop and he's texting his friends planning his Saturday night entertainment.

Then the BattFone goes off. Adam receives a Twitter DM alerting him to a Social Action hot off the wires from Idealist.org. There's an asylum seeker at the local welfare centre and they need a translator in a hurry. Just so happens Adam speaks "foreign" and so without much ado he's down there spending less than an hour making someone's life a lot easier.

Adam is the type of guy who'll answer a call for help but he's not always going to go out of his way to look for the needy. That's where BattFone comes in.

***

We want BattFone to be considered the early warning alert system for the Social Actions. An APB for the API.

We aim to combine the Social Actions API with Twitter and eventually other networks   to create a multi-way Social Actions communications system. Using http://BattFone.me users will register to be alerted via Twitter, e-mail and other means when actions they've specified an interest in are created.

BattFone is a filter and alert system to get the right Social Actions to the right Social Actors at the right time.
The right time isn't always quarter a after midnight during a surfing session. It can be whenever and wherever the Action is created.

BattFone is focused heavily on the end-user. It's main purpose is to act as an instigator of real world action. We want to take relevant Social Actions off the social networks and put them into the hands of people who will answer the call for help.

We expect BattFone to be most useful in urban environments where rich sets of actions will be targeted at the most focused set of actors possible. As the Social Actions API develops we expect location awareness to play a key role. Right now however we're working with what we can in this regard.

BattFone.me has been created by Heather MacKenzie and Cian O'Donovan. Heather runs her own private teletherapy practice out of Wilmington, North Carolina. By day Cian heads up the new media operations for the UK broadcaster Setanta Sports. By night he divides his time between social action, sustainability and food issues, and how we can use human networks to solve them.