According to a recent survey, the average cell-phone user in the USA sent or received 357 text messages per month in the second quarter of this year, up 450 percent from just two years ago.

I’ve never really been able to get into SMS’ing, the touchpad is just too frustrating. I’ve taken to replying to texts with cryptic messages from my cell phone message templates.

Example

inbound: Where are you?
my reply: in about half an hour

.. at least my family knows that some sort of response indicates I’m still alive.

But seriously, SMS is huge, especially among them thar young ‘uns. The Nielsen Mobile survey also found the typical US teenage mobile subscriber aged 13-17 now sends or receives over 1700 text messages per month! No wonder they all seem so distracted!

So, the moral of the story folks - SMS services are still very hot, hot, hot. But a word of warning, providing support for these sorts of services can also be very high; been there and done that. With a mish mash of infrastructure, multiple carriers and impatient users; lots of things can go wrong out in mobile land when it comes to SMS and related services; well, it was like that back a few years ago when I was heavily involved with ringtones anyway.

Of course, if you’re going to get into any SMS related service, you need to know the lingo - check out my (somewhat aging) smiley and textspeak dictionary.

By the way, if you’re like me and hate SMS’ing via a cell phone keypad, you can always use a VOIP service such as Skype via your computer to send your text messages - it’s much faster and more reliable than SMS via email I’ve found.