Texting is still king

  by futureatlas.com

Despite the wide range of engaging social media available today it never ceases to amaze me that the undisputed king of communication in the net is the humble text message (SMS Short Message service) of 160 characters. It originally emerged as a signalling service in the 2nd generation mobile telephone system GSM in the early 1990s, used at first only for telling you that there was a voicemail message waiting for you. Given its limitations (160 characters, text only, low priority in the network, no guarantee of immediate delivery etc) its rise to fame was largely accidental. The idea of using it to communicate developed because mobile calls were expensive whereas texting was, at least in some countries, much cheaper. The rest is history but it's an excellent case of a service that became successful by accident. No company foresaw its popularity. Later the MMS was developed allowing you to send photos but it never took off in the same way.

Even today, despite the impressive numbers produced by Facebook and Twitter, the SMS is still the choice communication method of young people who weren't even born when the service first took off. An article in The Atlantic, The Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting, shows the results of a recent survey of young people's media habits and all social media are in the shadow of texting. Classic voice telephony is now relegated to being an optional extra.

So why does texting still beat Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the others?

• Firstly and most importantly it's not owned by a company and you don't have to sign up for it. No company owns the messages you send and they're not searchable. 
• Texting is available to all regardless of device, model, network etc. No updates, incompatible versions etc.
• Texting works everywhere with mobile coverage.
• In today's incomprehensible telecoms market unblimited texting is usually thrown into every deal and that adds to the attraction.

A further factor is the "good enough" concept. Successful services often have lower quality than competitors but due to their simplicity they are considered good enough. Listening to music as mp3 files is not particularly uplifting in terms of audio quality but the format wins in terms of its versatility and universitality. Texting has no bells or whistles, no fireworks or wow factor - it's simply good enough.