Remember when Short Codes were all the rage? That was a few decades (in Internet years, that is) before QR codes walked into the bar and stole the limelight.

I’m still a big fan of SMS, even though I use QR Codes for all manner of things. More on this later.)

We in the West are all enamored when we hear how a majority of the world is now mobile. 91 Percent of Americans own mobile phones, according to a Pew report in May.

When I was visiting Sri Lanka I ran into some interesting uses of Information-Communication Tech, I touched on ICT in a passing way in Chat Republic, only because I was making the case that social media users need to understand that the new, new thing they stumble upon is based on some very old concepts –crowd-sourcing being one of these.

I met the folks at Sri Lanka’s Information Communication Technology Agency, and they talked about a lesser-known project that enabled rural villages to use of ‘short codes’ via mobile phones to provide what amounted to SMS-enabled commodity trading.

Yes you read that right: Commodity trading for farmers for farmers!

It worked like this: A farmer sends an SMS to a knowledge hub using a particular short code, providing details of what he has to sell. Buyers or whole-sellers also subscribe to the service, and the portal matches the buyer and seller. The mobile device is just the tool that enables that digital hand-shake between these two groups of people.

They may never meet, but have learned to trust each other because of a secure network, and their comfort level with short codes.

Trust is a rare commodity in the social media space we inhabit. There are workshops and books on building trust, and I’ve read a few. But in practice, the ease of use, and the ability to fake it on social media is causing a backlash. We have become more skeptical of those who push links at us. Our digital handshakes, though instantaneous, and seamless are fraught with problems.

We may be all Web 2.0 but we tend to forget the basic tenets of being Human 1.0. Just ask those farmers who are using basically 1.0 tools.

Note: The image, above, is from a similar project in Bangladesh.