All of these messages were sent via something called short messaging service (more commonly known as SMS), a mobile phone feature that's widely used in Asia and Europe but mostly ignored here in the States. Euro-teens use SMS almost like PC-based instant messaging; in Asia, SMS has caught on with adults as well.
Forrester analyst Rob Enderle and I were talking about this on the phone over the weekend. We agreed that the government of Hong Kong sending 6 million SARS-related SMS messages to its citizens could be a hint at how SMS might actually catch on here.
With SMS, it's possible--at least in theory--to send a message to every cellular device within a given distance from a particular place. I haven't been able to find out if US cellular systems have this same capability, but I'm sure that, if they don't, Tom Ridge (US Homeland Security secretary) is looking into it.
A purist might point out that a government agency sending out mass e-mails isn't the same thing as using SMS to send and receive messages person-to-person. And I'd agree.
Sending an SMS message from a handset can actually be pretty difficult. It also incurs charges above and beyond your normal cellular bill, sometimes on a per-message basis; if you send a lot of messages, those charges can really add up. And North Americans typically have excellent access to e-mail, which is, after all, a much better way to send text messages. But the big reason SMS never caught on here: It's far easier just to call.
There's also the privacy issue: Giving someone your SMS "address" is the same thing as giving them your cellular telephone number. So if I don't want to give someone my phone number, they can't SMS me, either.
And finally there's the issue of spam. I think I'm one of the few people in North America who has received SMS spam. One reason the spammers haven't started using SMS is because most Americans don't know how to read an SMS message. Of course, with spam filters already catching lots of e-mail messages, knowing recipients aren't reading the messages seems only to encourage spammers to send more.
But the fact remains that none of these drawbacks kept SMS from catching on globally. So what will it take to make SMS catch on in the US?
Getting routine alerts--weather advisories, traffic reports, and the occasional terrorist threat/dire epidemic warning--would probably help turn Americans into a nation of SMS readers, if not active senders.
"All-you-can-eat" pricing would also help. AT&T, for example, will let you send 100 messages a month for US$5, but after that it's US$0.10 each. Receiving messages is free. At this rate, a kid who sends 10 messages a day would add US$25 to his monthly mobile phone bill. (If you think 10 messages is a lot to send each day, remember that these are short messages; a real "conversation" might require five or six of them.)
Of course, something has to be done to stop SMS spam before it gets started. I am not sure how this will be done, perhaps by allowing only SMS devices to talk to one another and allowing Internet sends only though protected Web pages.
For emergency purposes, vendors also need to make it easier to find and read these special messages on their handsets. There also needs to be a capability to set off some sort of special alarm--like a loud ringer--when a message is received.
Forrester's Enderle says the need for such instant warnings could turn SMS into an important tool if Americans become as concerned for their well being as Hong Kong's residents became during the SARS outbreak.
"If this kind of thing keeps up, we're going to wonder how we ever lived without instant notification of places not to be," he told me.
Yes, it's a different world we live in now. Or maybe, as in the case of an epidemic, it's the same old world. It's just that now we have some new and potentially powerful tools with which to fight our old enemies (disease, pestilence, etc.). Oddly enough, a handset could be one of them.
Reading American articles like this one usually leave me feeling quite disoriented. SMS hard to read, tough to type, the concepts of an SMS 'address' seem like anachronisms from a distant age. Looking deeper, there seem to be two plausible reasons why SMS is still such a mystery to the average American user.
1. CDMA, the preferred radio technology in the US, did not natively support SMS. It was introduced primarily to keep up with the worldwide GSM texting craze.
2. The Blackberry RIM, which was essentially a two way pager on the Mobitex paging system and is now moving to a GPRS platform, has over 534,000, mostly corporate users. After being used to convenience of a qwerty keyboard and a large form factor screen, the 160 character limit and alphanumeric keypad of a mobile phone would seem restrictive.
Add to this the fact that inter-operator SMS became a reality only recently. Putting it all together might explain to some extent why US needs the paranoia of a virus infection to adopt a simple and tremendously popular technology.
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