DNS - What Would it Take for Texting to Overtake Twitter?

There are several differences between texting and tweeting. Texting tends to be about one-to-one communications, while tweeting is a one-to-many mode. Texting is more often about coordinating one user's life with others, tweets more about status updates. Texting is more typically conducted only with people one knows fairly well. Tweeting recipients include virtual strangers.

 

So what would a service provider need to think about, or do, to make texting more like tweeting?

The first issue is to re-imagine the business model a bit. Twitter's cost to multicast messages is fundamentally different from a carrier's costs, because each recipient must use a telephone number, and use of telephone numbers for texting carries definite termination costs that Twitter does not incur.

 

Twitter doesn't have to worry about “what network a user is on,” while a robust social texting application would require such information.

 

On the other hand, there are models for managing such costs, including “settlement-free” interconnection or “reciprocal compensation,” where terminating carriers get paid based on the volume of terminated messages.

 

In principle, Sprint's (News - Alert) “Any Mobile” plan, which offers “no incremental cost” calls to any mobile device within the United States, is an example. Walled gardens don't work for highly-popular communication applications, so it is doubtful any service that only worked for users of one carrier’s services would be a big hit

 

On the back end, such a capability would require the same sorts of database features now used to allow buddy lists to be built and maintained. Also, since social texting would be a one-to-many communications mode, carriers would have to modify and “consumerize” the same sorts of technology used today to support opt-in text messaging campaigns.

 

Social texting would also require creation of Web-based and mobile-based social sites, or would have to piggyback on existing popular social sites, since both texting and tweeting are about opt-in communications with groups of people where context is valuable. But social networks typically allow sending of messages where no reply is necessarily expected. It is a broadcast, not a one-to-one conversation.

 

Social network communications are archived and searchable, so social texting would have to add those sorts of features as well.

 

It goes without saying that a revenue model would have to be created as well. Still, mobile operators already are looking at some of these issues, such as message archiving, as well as at a number of ways to “add value and stickiness to SMS offerings, including archiving,” said Alan Pascoe, senior manager at Tekelec (News - Alert).

 

“The most common ideas we hear discussed are email-like functionalities: archiving, copying, forwarding, black and white lists and group distribution,” Pascoe said. “The wild card for text message archiving demand is Google (News - Alert) Voice, which allows subscribers to store SMS in Gmail instead of on their phones, keeping messages indefinitely.”

 

“With Google providing this for free, it may be difficult for operators to generate revenue from it,” Pascoe added.

 

That arguably would be less a concern for a social texting application or service, but the point is that mobile operators already are thinking about ways to boost text messaging value. And social texting, to rival Twitter, has to be among the approaches with upside.

 

A recent survey by the Pew (News - Alert) Internet & American Life Project shows that eight percent of Internet users between eight and 17 years old use Twitter while 66 percent send or receive text messages. Even among older teens between the ages of 14 and 17, only 10 percent are likely to use Twitter. But both Twitter and texting are short-message text communication formats. The difference is that Twitter is a social network.

 

And while youngsters might not be using Twitter all that much, they are heavy users of social networks. About 73 percent of teenagers online use one or more social networks compared with 47 percent of adults, researchers at Pew say.

 

What remains to be seen is whether social texting can be used in one-to-many mode as well as in one-to-one mode, and whether those ways of communicating are social enough, easy enough and valuable enough to encourage high rates of adoption.

 

And, of course, carriers will have to ascertain whether there is a business model. But maybe the question should be raised directly: what would it take for texting to replace Twitter?