No, this isn’t the story of an Essex mum who discovered that her daughter had not gone to school, eaten or slept in 4 1/2 months because she’s joined at the thumb with her mobile phone, having texted her friends with “I ain’t bovered” 3 trillion times (though that’s entirely plausible too)

Three trillion text messages is how many 2.1 billion mobile users have sent across the world in the past year. Om Malik writes about this means of communication which can only be compared with the likes of email in terms of widespread success.

The popularity of SMS parallels that of email: It is simple, easy and doesn’t need any expensive gear to send or receive. Like email, it is socialist in its usage — a cheap $50 phone can send and receive SMS messages from a luxury model, Nokia N95 and even more snobbish iPhone.

Text messaging has undeniably become a useful communication tool when we don’t have time or energy for the polite conversation sugarcoating required in a phone conversation. SMS is direct, to the point and can be as asynchronous as you like. It’s clever and enables all sorts of long distance actions like letting your mates know you’ll be late, updating your status on Twitter or even getting your Personal Video Recorder to record something for you*.

Now, all together, “We love SMS!”

[* If you've managed to get this working, do let me know! I've yet to get it working properly. ]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under Community and social networks, Mobile devices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.