In Britain the Christmas and New Year holiday, complete with cold weather, boiled sprouts and re-hashed specials on TV, has acquired a new tradition: the seasonal text message. Between unwrapping presents and stuffing the turkey, we now take the time to tap out messages to send to the mobiles of our friends and family.
Examples range from the rowdy, like "<|:)=," which means "get your party hat on;" to the affectionate, like "HYAMLC," which means Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas: to the flirty, like "wan2 jgle my @@s," which means "want to jingle my bells?"
For those challenged by deciphering all these strange little symbols appearing on their mobile phone, there are handy translation guides. One of the best-selling books of the year in the UK has been Wan2Tlk: Ltle Bk of Text Msgs, a slim, undemanding guidebook for those wishing to make themselves understood in this strange new land of texters.
This is far from just a British fad. Worldwide, the GSM Association estimates that 250 billion text messages were sent last year. They are popular everywhere, except the US.
Text messaging might seem flippant and childish, but it is rapidly becoming a big business. On New Year's Day alone, it is estimated that more than 77 million text messages were sent across the UK's four main mobile phone networks, generating more than US$10 million of revenue for those companies. Even on a normal day, 38 million text messages are sent within the UK, according to the Mobile Data Association. It may be a craze, but it's a lucrative one.
It would be a mistake to dismiss texting as a fad of interest only to teenagers and geeks. Texting is creating a big industry, out of which a lot of money is being made. The rise of the text message also contains lessons about which technologies work in the marketplace and which don't. At a time when billions have been squandered by bankers, venture capitalists and corporations on technologies that nobody wanted, that makes it an important story.
The success of texting makes clear everything that was wrong with the technology boom of the past five years. Texting was spontaneous and organic, it was led by consumers, and it was about people communicating with one another, not having "content" pushed down their throats by big media companies.
Nobody ever planned for texting to be a big business. SMS, for short messaging service, was added to mobile phones as a cheap extra feature, with little more thought than the alarm clocks, calculators and phone directories manufacturers also throw onto their handsets.
Messaging at first an `interim technology'
Nor did the telecommunications companies think much of it: they were focused on snazzy third-generation data services. SMS was never regarded as anything more than an interim technology.
And, indeed, technologically it's not up to much. There are few very profound thoughts that can be adequately expressed on the keypad of a mobile phone (although Helen Fielding, the author of Bridget Jones's Diary, has signed up to produce some installments of the famous singleton's adventures in text format).
It doesn't matter. Texting is popular for three reasons. It's cheap -- tariffs vary but most messages cost about US$0.14 cents to send. It's convenient -- most people have their mobiles switched on all the time, so they get the message almost immediately (whereas an e-mail can take days). And it's fun -- the very limitations of the medium force people to be both brief and flip, which, as any writer will tell you, are both qualities to be admired.
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