In the wake of the London bombings last month, we’ve seen several different ideas pop up — ICE, where the idea’s to get people to specify emergency contacts in their phonebook, and sousveillance, getting people to use their cameraphones for anti-terrorist surveillance. Another’s emerged this week, aiming to help alleviate the crowding on mobile networks that results from all the “I’m OK” calls and messages in the immediate aftermath of this type of event.

The textOK service lets people in the UK set up contact lists, then for 25p, they send an “OK” message to a short code, which then sends an email with the message to all their contacts. It’s a novel idea, and a pretty good one — and is something operators should latch on to and offer for their users.

While the company running the service says it will donate profits to charity, which sounds great, they are a marketing company — raising questions of just what they’ll do with all the contact info users give them. The company says they hate spam, and sends an email to a user’s contacts just to let them know about the service and so they’re not surprised should they receive a message. But, they also point out their terms and conditions say users agree “to receive occaisonal emails from us reminding you to keep your contacts up to date, new textOK features and details about our Charity fundraising and information from our partners”.

That doesn’t sound too promising, and highlights the need for a trusted provider to deliver these kinds of services. It’s a void mobile operators could fill very easily, and they could improve on it by forwarding messages via SMS rather than email. Hopefully textOK isn’t just a spam front, because that could dent the potential of mobile services like this.