I just read a post on Venture Beat where a Fatwa for the death of SMS was issued. I kid you not – go there and read it yourselves. I will even provide a link with the post title – here it is: Twitter kills SMS service in some countries over costs. Will someone kill SMS already?.
Yes friends, will someone kill SMS already? Haven’t you heard? SMS deserves to die. Why? Because Twitter can’t make money and pay its operator bills. SMS deserves to die because it is preventing my fuckbuddies in the UK from following my every move on Twitter, where I diligently post every 15 minutes or less.
Will someone kill SMS already?
Now, serious.
Would someone who poses as a serious commentator on issues of, say, the transportation industry write a blog post saying “will someone kill the internal combustion engine already”? The global SMS network, that (with painful well documented exceptions) virtually connects all operators in all countries will serve 2 trillion messages this year. I don’t know how many messages Twitter is (barely) handling these days, but I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark. Now why exactly do we want SMS to be killed? Oh yes, because it’s not free, like good old reliable Twitter is – oh wait, maybe if Twitter weren’t free, the reliability problems would go away? Just an idea.
Old readers of this blog (yes, the two of you) know that one of my favorite pastimes is to observe the reaction of “new media” commentators to the rise of the mobile internet, and how they normally get everything backwards when looking at mobile (a set of standardized applications enabled by mostly proprietary non-neutral networks) through web (small pieces loosely joined yada yada) glasses. Most cases of this syndrome, which I like to call Eternal September 2.0 are just amusing. Some cross the line into annoying and beyond. Like watching an old man curse and scream at the weather, watching webheads complain about the idiosyncrasies of mobile as if they were only that – mere irrelevant idiosyncrasies – can be a test of patience.
But you know, at least I have my blog where I can curse back and scream and have some fun while doing it.
Update: Tom Hume quoted this post in his blog. It was then picked up by Mobhappy’s Carlo Longino, who wrote a very interesting piece there – go read it.
© 2008 Bernardo Carvalho
7 responses so far ↓
1 MobHappy » Blog Archive » About That Twitter Thing // Aug 14, 2008 at 7:09 pm
[...] on the desk. And I’m not the only one. Tom Hume points to a great piece at rawsocket.org with this excellent quote that sums things up for me pretty well: Like watching an old man curse and scream at the weather, [...]
2 charlie // Aug 15, 2008 at 12:58 am
Like always: GREAT.
3 C. Enrique Ortiz // Aug 15, 2008 at 9:16 am
SMS is King, from the end-user’s perspective. SMS is heaven, from the operators’ perspective, as it is a cash cow. And SMS is hell for businesses that don’t have a good plan for monetizing it, as SMS is way expensive from the operation’s perspective…
ceo
4 SMS is King, Heaven and Hell, all at the same time | About Mobility Weblog // Aug 15, 2008 at 9:50 am
[...] question is not “Will someone kill SMS already?”. But the question is “Will SMS (costs) kill a Startup [...]
5 Micky // Aug 16, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Thats crazy, but having said that, certain countries have certain laws, and public data, and relation restrictions for one reason or another.
6 Patrick Bernier // Sep 29, 2008 at 7:42 pm
SMS certainly deserves to die (or at least be gradually deprecated), but for another reason.
Here in Japan, SMS has been virtually dead for years. Why? Because every single mobile phone supports receiving and sending standard e-mail. Size used to be limited to a few hundred characters, but nowadays even on the cheapest terminals it’s more like ten thousand. And over the years, support for attachments has been added as well: pictures, video, you name it — some of the latest phones can even view PDFs and MS Office files! And recently, rich text support (called “DecoMail” by DoCoMo) has been added as well. And because all this is using the same standards that we see everyday on the Internet, it’s fully interoperable with standard e-mail all around the world.
Electronic mail uses the phone’s packet transmission plan, so you’re not charged by the message, but by the byte — unless all like serious users you happen to have an unlimited data plan, which will maybe add 3000 yen (about 30 USD) per month on top of your voice plan.
SMS is still supported by all devices, but the only remaining reason to use it is when you don’t know the other party’s e-mail address (which has nothing to do with their phone number). And then… it will cost you.
I was surprised at first — in a country where things tend to be done in a different way from everywhere else… the “Japanese” way… you’d expect a weird custom messaging system. But right from the start, while North American operators were dabbling with WAP and whatnot, DoCoMo started its i-Mode service using regular HTTP and HTML, and likewise decided to use standard Internet messaging.
Over a decade later… the rest of the world is barely starting to catch up.
7 Felipe Andrade - Mobile Developer (Widgets | WRT | Flash Lite | Python for S60 | Symbian C++) » Blog Archive » Predictions for the following years: will SMS die?! // Dec 26, 2008 at 10:22 am
[...] is “probably”. There are some interesting articles and comments discussing it, from Bernardo Carvalho and other from VentureBeat. In my point of view, as the internet on mobile is growing and services [...]
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