(ABC News)--It was 20 years ago today that the first text message was sent. It was
Dec. 3, 1992, and Neil Papworth, an engineer working in the UK, sent the
world's first short message service or SMS. It read "Merry Christmas."
But while most are entering their prime at age 20, the text message might just be past its glory years.
The History -- In More Than 160 Characters
Papworth, however, was in his prime when he hit the send button on that
first text. At the age of 22, Papworth was working for a company called
Semea Group Telecoms, which had been working on a mobile messaging
project for Vodafone, a European cellular carrier.
"It happened that day that Vodafone wanted to try sending a message to
Richard Jarvis, one of the directors there, who was at a Christmas
party. So we sat at the computer and typed him a message and then sent
him the message 'Merry Christmas,'" Papworth told ABC News. "For me it
was just another day's testing, it didn't seem to be anything big at the
time."
But, of course, it turned into something very big -- at least once some
of the consumer technology caught up. On that day in 1992, Papworth
didn't send the first message with his thumbs on a mobile phone. He sent
it from a big computer in one of Vodafone's offices to a Orbatel 901
mobile phone, which was the size of today's office phones, Papworth
explains.
(Papworth isn't the inventor of the text message; the origins of the
idea date back to 1984 when Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, was
working with Nokia on mobile messaging.)
At that time, you could only receive messages on phones; you couldn't
actually send messages from phones until a year or so later when phones
from Nokia and others had the proper capabilities.
"Years went on and people were able to start to send text messages. It
took quite a few years of it to take off," Papworth said. "But by the
10th anniversary it was fairly big by then."
The Rise and Start of the Fall
And it became even bigger than that. In 2010, the International
Telecommunications Union reported that 200,000 text messages were sent
every minute and 6.1 trillion texts were sent worldwide. In June 2012,
the CTIA mobile trade group reported that 184.3 billion text messages
were sent a month in the United States -- up from 28.9 billion a month
in 2007.
But in 2012, there is building evidence that text messaging is past its
peak as more and more people have smartphones and use e-mail, instant
messaging, iMessage, and other mobile messaging services to communicate.
In November, the New York Times reported that
in the third quarter of 2012 text messaging was down. According to a
report by Chetan Sharma, a mobile analyst, cell owners sent 678 text
messages a month, down from 696 a month the previous quarter. It's not a
huge hit, but it falls in line with other reports that text message
usage is dropping.
"Texting isn't evolving, therefore it's declining," Patrick Moorhead,
principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News. "There
are way too many alternatives like iMessage, BBM, Facebook chat and
Google Chat that are cross-platform that texting is a backup now for
sophisticated users. Texting is more reliable but is declining as a
primary tool."
Other experts also point out that users still need to pay for text
messaging, while some of the other services are free, with no cap on the
number of messages.
"It comes down to cost -- carriers still charge extra for text messaging
after all these years, even though it costs essentially nothing to
operate. It's pure margin," Chris Ziegler, a mobile phone expert and
senior editor at The Verge, told ABC News. "Alternatives like BBM,
iMessage, WhatsApp, and traditional instant messaging services, like
Google Talk and Microsoft Messenger, only require a data package, which
any smartphone user already has anyway. A savvy subscriber can dispense
of their text messaging plan altogether and rely on data alone."
Additionally, with more of those services and social networks like
Twitter and Facebook, users are finding texting to lack the features of
the others. Ironically, Twitter, which says 60 percent of its users
access the service on mobile, was based on text messaging. Like SMS'
160-character limit, Twitter has a 140-character limit and was designed
that way because of text message capabilities.
"Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but
ubiquitous technology. In fact, Twitter's 140-character limit was
designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety
whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated
Internet enabled device," Twitter wrote on its blog back in 2010.
But while Papworth admits that texting is past its prime, he believes it
will still be very relevant for years to come. While a growing part of
the population owns smartphones, which allow you to instant message,
email, or connect to social networks, cellphone use without those
features is growing at a very fast rate in emerging markets like India
or Africa.
"Those handsets can do text messaging, but not everything can use data,"
he said. "Yes, the data is showing that it is starting to decline, but
it's not going to go away. There is a lot of use for it alongside all
the data services."
Copyright 2012 by ABC News
