At last: Americans are beginning to use SMS. Mobile users in Europe have been in love with texting for half a decade now - around two thirds of cellphone owners make at least some use of text messages.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
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