I like SMS. It's completely universal, anyone who owns a phone made in the last 10 years can use it. It's great to build applications on top of (Twilio, Voxeo), and it's very efficient-- a little slower than XMPP, but it has the advantage that you can use it anywhere, even if there's no wifi.
Paying to send 160 chars of text is a little annoying, but at $0.01/text it's hard to complain too much about.
> $0.01/text it's hard to complain too much about.
That depends entirely on where you are and whether or not you have a texting plan.
For example, I have very little use for texting, and simply cannot justify the cost of a monthly texting plan for my (non-smart) phone. Since I'm in Canada, and our telecom companies are all complete bastards up here, I pay $0.15 to send a text. I also pay $0.15 to receive a text. It's ridiculous.
Unlimited texting plans are about $10 iirc. If you can't justify the cost of a monthly texting plan then you're paying < $10, which is hardly ridiculous.
It's ridiculous because if the cell companies can afford to allow you to send 1000s of texts for $10/month, then:
* Why does it cost $0.15/text to send/receive? 1000 texts at that rate is $150.00.
* Why do they charge for incoming text and then make it so hard to block incoming texts?
* There are perverse incentives. The cell carriers have no incentive to block/deter SMS spam on their network. Actually, they are incentivized to allow it.
* In the US, on some carriers, it's ~ $0.25 - $0.35 to send/receive texts without a plan, whereas unlimited is usually ~$10/month.
* The cell carriers want people to pay a standard rate because it makes their accounting calculations/projections easier.
* The cell carriers want people to pay a standard rate because they probably would pay less on a pay-as-you-go plan. (Though if people started taxing the SMS system, they would quickly reverse course and start talking about people being 'SMS hogs.')
My parents, on Verizon, have a family plan. Due to business partners who insist on texting all the time, they have unlimited texting added to the account. $30/month, across two phones.
AT&T, as has been reported ad infinitum, is eliminating their $10 per 1000 texts per month plan. Unlimited texts, now your only option, is $20/month (I have no clue about their family plans).
Given that the FCC, FTC, and whoever spend zero time looking into this, I'd say the consumer is simply and increasingly screwed.
As I understand it, text messages started as a side effect. Someone noticed that there was spare room in the status messages flying between towers and phones, and thought, hmm, what can we do with that? (Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I recall it.)
Yes it's overpriced, but the logic of "paying per use would cost more than buying a package" doesn't hold up, because it's how most things work.
If you rent a single DVD it will cost more per film than if you get an unlimited monthly plan. If you buy a single song on iTunes it will cost more per song than if you buy the album. If you rent a car for the weekend it will cost more per day than if you buy the car and use it all the time.
The main cost is the infrastructure, hence why the more you buy, the cheaper it can go.
carriers do not guarantee SMS delivery or its timeliness. i had SMS messages arrive hours, even days after they were sent. i had SMS messages lost in space altogether.
Everyone I know can get an SMS on their phone. Only a couple of those people can get email on their phone. That means that if I want to contact most of them quickly, but quietly, I have only 1 choice: SMS.
SMS would die quickly if something else came along that became ubiquitous overnight. Since we know that isn't going to happen, there's no point complaining about it.
Unfortunately right now the choice is SMS (one app, in my dock standard), or GroupMe for some friends, Kik for some others, a few on Facebook Messenger, four or five who've figured out Huddle, and some other small fragment once iMessage shows up.
I think this is why iMessage is attractive, because you're not supposed to notice the difference between messaging friends via SMS or via iMessage.
Now if there were the same cross-platform transparency between other messaging services then that'd be something really great. Sort of like what the hybrid IM clients kinda-achieved in the late 90s.
If your friends use IM services, you can use an IM aggregator like imo, Meebo, or IM+. There's also eBuddy, but in the past they have sent passwords to their servers in plaintext.
I would love to see SMS disappear. The two things I think are holding it back:
- Phone's default ringtones for SMS are much more notable than the email alert. Change the defaults on phones so that it's more obvious when an email arrives and people will be more likely to use it.
- Less spam. People are generally confident that SMS messages are sent from someone they know, so they check them immediately. If email had less spam, people would be more interested when email arrives.
Fix these two things and I think there will be broader appeal to email as a replacement to SMS.
$0.01 per 160 characters for reduced number of spam messages. Good deal. Especially since I am still using an old-world phone which can't run SMS.app (i.e no spam catcher).
If I had to delete 50 spam sms a day using my tiny mobile phone buttons....
I use SMS because it has the best integration with my phone. I can set up quick reply so I don't even have to leave the app I am in to reply to someone.
I only use the google voice app when I have little service but still on wifi.
SMS is arguably less secure than email over an SSL connection. Why would you even consider sending credit card details over SMS? Not only can SMS messages be sniffed and you have no idea if carriers are encrypting it or unencrypting it, but your SMS messages are stored unprotected on both the sending and receiving phones. These could get lost, stolen, or hacked. News Corp cell phone hacking scandal? Celebrity cell phone hackig scandals? If you have an smart phone and sync back up to a computer it copies over your SMS history in plain text. If a police officer pulls you over he has a device that can copy over the entire contents of your cell phone. Common criminals or anyone else aren't far behind.
The best way to exchange credit card information safely is when every step is certified to be PCI compliant which has very strict rules for how credit card information is transmitted, handled, and stored and who can handle them.
I would sooner speak my credit card number to a trusted vendor's call center employee than SMS it anywhere. I have yet to give out my credit card over the phone and I'd never email it.
Paying to send 160 chars of text is a little annoying, but at $0.01/text it's hard to complain too much about.