Before you head out for your summer weekend, check out this interesting story over at TheNextWeb about our global love for text messaging:
Acision, known for its mobile messaging solutions has conducted a study into the world of the SMS. It’s a technology that is more than twenty years old but it is still one of the most widely used communications methods in the world.
So why do we love SMS? Acision worked with Internet psychologist Graham Jones to look at survey results from the UK and find out why it’s so popular in the broadband era.
...Over half of all respondents in the survey said they still need text or would be lost without it. It should be noted that there are many Internet communications services that can be linked to SMS too.
But the main reasons why we still use a technology this old, is likely to be related to reliability, or, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
“The findings of this study show that text messaging remains popular, and I believe this comes down to trust and reliability. If a user sends a message via a social network, it may feel less immediate, and there are more technological hurdles which could hinder the delivery. Texting however often elicits an immediate response.
Jones also feels that the expansion of choice for text-based communications may be leading users back to the devil they know, “The introduction of a plethora of new messaging services may mean that people may get confused and fall back on the reliable SMS. Running in the back of the human mind is the need to do everything with the least possible effort, and we instinctively search for the easiest way to communicate. This is why we rely on and still love text messaging.”