My friend Om wrote All Hail The SMS on Sunday. SMS is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and talking with a number of people. Om points to this piece by Paul Ruppert on Mobile Messaging 2.0.

Is Text Messaging Terminal ? by Paul Ruppert  

Is multimodal messaging the death of mobile text messaging? Will voice or other modality substituted messaging eventually depose text based mobile messaging? I’ve tripped over a pile of tangled impressions that got me thinking about this.

In talking to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and some research pundits over the summer, I repeatedly ran into boosters of “multimodal messaging,” and “Unified Communications.” It was reminiscent of the old notion of “Universal Messaging” which I examined as a fledging product development director back in 1998–before the turn of the century (ouch). “Universal Messaging” then was an Internet-based service that gathered messages from all media (email, voice mail, faxes) in one place and converted them into digital files, accessible via the web and potentially via mobile. I’m sure you’re using it every day, right?

Ruppert talks about the old idea of universal messaging, and it's evolution into multimodal messaging of todays' unified communications environment. It's a splendid read and does a great job of speaking to the technology. Om's piece is more to the point, SMS is popular. In the US, it's finally almost as popular as it's been for years in other areas of the globe. That's right, the US is almost leaving third-world country status behind in mobile communications. Almost.

As a baby boomer, I find it unsurprising when my colleagues, co-workers and peers send a stream of text messages, But today, text is more that a simple message. SMS couple with MMS to deliver video shorts and pictures. Coupled with Facebook and Twitter, SMS becomes a broadcast medium for sharing. Sharing life's moments large and small.

Many of us still talk about a federated IM client. Something that works with Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Skype, Gtalk, and the rest. That's not happening. Not now, and not likely ever, because those service providers don't have any incentive to make it happen. But SMS has supplanted IM for many. It's my personal preferred IM tool. And SMS has become a gateway protocol to larger environs. You can MMS a picture to Facebook and have it populate your photo album. SMS Google to get information. SMS Twitter to arrange dinner plans. SMS will find you the nearest Starbucks too.

SMS is like IP. It's becoming a glue that binds the pieces of the network together.

What do you use for instant messaging, and how much do you use SMS?

Technorati Tags: SMS, short message system, mobility