Is Texting Waning? Or Waxing?

From a technological perspective, the riots that rocked London, in August last year, were significantly different from the unrest that toppled the Arab dictators, Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine, and Muammar Gaddafi in the spring of the same year.

For the first time, the rioters used the BlackBerry Messenger to rouse a crowd. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. Unlike Twitter, the service encrypts almost all messages when they leave the sender’s phone—and are therefore, untraceable—and unlike texting, it is free. 

The findings of a research firm, OVUM, recently reported in the BBC, found that social-messaging apps, or IP-based messaging services, had eaten into the profits of SMS (short, for Short Messaging Service). The cell phone companies had incurred staggering losses of $13.9 billion in 2011.

One reason, the study revealed, social-messaging apps such as Facebook chat, Whatsapp, and BlackBerry Messenger, have been gaining steady ascendancy, is that they are free. Texting, on the other hand, is a paid service. 

That does not tell us the entire story, I think. And, I see this as a case of a tendency to inflate a trend. 

A smart phone, essentially, an Internet-enabled cell phone, is an infinitely more high-maintenance device than one without one that only enables talking and texts. One pays more when one communicates via apps. 

I would also point out that social messaging is certainly not taking over the world. 

In fact, in the world’s largest democracy, the largest social network is not Facebook—surprise—but SMS GupShup, a group messaging service, which, per a recent TechCrunch, report, boasted an impressive 45 million users, and handled two billion messages, a month. 

The soaring popularity of texting in India has been capitalized on by Just Dial, simplistically defined, as a text-based Yellow Page service. 

The Economist relayed: 

Set up in 1996 as a sort of phone-based yellow pages, it initially offered a fixed-line voice-based service dispensing information about the nearest coffee shop, electrician, tarot-card reader, hospital, or whatever else the caller happened to be looking for. Many users preferred it to the clunky, state-published phone directories. 

Customers would dial in and make their inquiries. A human operator would provide the information, and they would jot it down on a piece of paper. Today, customers ask the responses to be texted to them, which are done under 60 seconds of the call. 

This is how they make money. 

The operator also offers to connect the caller directly, at no extra charge, to one of the company's "preferred vendors", a ruse reminiscent of Google's sponsored links. 

The company launched into the U.S. market, in May of last year. 

Perhaps, it would be realistic to say that if texting is waning in one part of the world, in other parts, it is waxing.