A few years back I wrote about text messaging using a service on your computer (i.e. AIM - AOL Instant Messenger). In 2005, the teenagers were going gang busters with IM’ing (Instant Messaging) on their computers and giving up voice communicating via the landline telephone. Fast forwarding to 2009, what has changed? Besides social networking via Facebook and MySpace becoming huge, Twitter has caught on like a wild fire (
see Peter Kay’s article on Twitter). IM’ing is still popular but has moved into the wireless world of cell phone SMS-texting (SMS for short).
SMS stands for Short Message Service and was created to use the excess capacity of early digital wireless telephone services of the 80’s. SMS is limited to 140 character messages which is the same limit for Twitter messages. These messages are the right length to have a text conversation that previously done via voice. Little did the creators of the service know that there would be an explosive adoption of their new invention. Also due to the limitation in length of the message, words are appreviate which has started a new sub-language on it's own (e.g. LOL - Laughing out loud; BRB - Be right back;
List).
If you are over 50 years old, there is a good chance that you have never sent a SMS on your cellphone. However, the youth of today live on sending messages to each other about the most trivial things. Anyone want to take a guess on the average number of SMS messages sent by an American teenager in one day? According to a survey done by Nielsen Mobile, the average is 80 (or 2,272 per month) messages per day sent and received by this age group. When including all mobile customers, the average goes down to 15 messages per day. However, Cellsigns.com states that teenagers are not the largest age group using SMS. They report that the median age is 38 years old and is probably due to the higher percentage of cell phone owned by this post teenage group. Also per Cellsigns.com, as of June 2008, over 75 billion texting messages were sent every month which is 4 times as many as in a year and half prior. It is estimated that SMS usage will continue to grow at the rate of 37% every six-months.
http://www.cellsigns.com/industry.shtml
All you need to SMS is a cell phone with the capability (just about all phones have this) and a service plan turned on by your cell phone carrier for text messaging. In the old days, SMS was 10 to 25 cents per message, so you could run a pretty hefty bill fast. However, now days, all the cell phone carriers have plans which offer unlimited, 1000 or 300 messages a month and they range in price from $5 to $30.
So why would you send a text message over calling someone? There have been many studies done to figure that out but I don’t think any of them are conclusive. My wife uses it to get messages to the kids when they are in school and not allowed to answer their cell phones. However, even when they are not in school, kids still prefer SMS over a voice call. This is so much the case, that a co-worker tells me that he will call his daughter and she will not answer the phone but if he sends her a SMS right after making an unsuccessful call, she will reply to him right away.
One last thought. If you want to use SMS but don't want to use your cell phone to send a message, there are websites that will allow you send a SMS to a cell phone of your choice (as long as you know the phone number). There are many sites that do this but this one is one of the easiest to use: http://www.onlinetextmessage.com/
Happy SMS'ing!
