;The downfall of Philippine President Joseph Estrada earlier this year is an example of what the people can do when they're well armed--in this case, with mobile phones that deliver short, simple text messages. Opposition organizers used this powerful new medium to broadcast details of upcoming rallies, reaching 100 supporters at a time. And this is no isolated case. On Valentine's Day, lovesick Thais crashed the country's largest mobile-phone network by sending 100,000 messages in less than an hour. In Finland, the average teenager is now thought to tap out 100 messages a month. A Danish medical clinic recently admitted its first texting addict, a chauffeur who sent up to 200 messages a day.
Something strange has happened to the mobile phone. In defiance of all industry forecasts, today's user seems to want to write, not chat. SMS, Short Message Service, has been around for a decade, but in recent years it began spreading like a virus throughout the globe. Last year the number of messages sent jumped fivefold, reaching 15 billion in December alone, or 200 billion in the past year, by some estimates. "The growth has been just amazing," says Bryony Clow of Vodafone, the world's largest mobile-phone network. "And there seems to be no end to it." Consultants at Logica, the U.K. software firm, reckon that by the end of 2002 the monthly total may reach 100 billion--or more than 15 messages for every person on the planet.
This phenomenon has surprised everybody. The telecom industry adopted SMS as a standard technology in 1991 as a way to sop up extra network capacity, just in case somebody somewhere might find it useful. Unlike e-mail, text messages arrive almost instantaneously, so that two people can have a text-based conversation as though they were in an Internet chat room. At first, subscribers were able to send messages only within their own networks. The service was neither advertised nor promoted. Phone manufacturers were no more ambitious: telephone keyboards are optimized for numbers, not letters. On many handsets, it still takes plenty of scrolling just to find the menu options for texting.
A year or two ago, teenagers and twentysomethings spotted potential. Here was an efficient way of communicating that had the powerful charm of novelty. Numbers rose rapidly, especially in the tech-friendly countries of the Far East and Scandinavia, where the mobile-phone boom first took off among young consumers. "This was the accidental revolution," says Simon Buckingham of the Mobile Lifestreams consultancy. "Consumers just adopted SMS as their own medium. Every generation needs its own way of expressing itself; this is the text generation."
Devotees say the charms of texting go far beyond novelty. The service has all the immediacy of a phone call--as well as extra privacy and just a hint of the subversive. "My dad overhears me [talking] on the phone all the time, but I don't have to worry about that with text messages," says Chika Saito, a high-school junior in Japan who sends about 10 messages a day. "I can punch the buttons real quick, using just one hand, and my dad says it drives him crazy just seeing me do it." Background noise is no problem--ever tried talking on a mobile phone from a crowded bar?--and reception isn't an issue. Besides, SMS is a handy means of ducking those big emotional challenges. A survey by the British polling firm MORI found that a heartless 13 percent of users have used text messages to break off relationships.
Best of all, the text habit doesn't strain even modest student budgets. A brief message--the technology allows a maximum length of just 160 characters--won't usually cost more than 15 cents. "It's cheap, it's quick and it's international," says 21-year-old Paris student Lara Bourji. "I can send a mes-sage anywhere in the world for one franc." These budget rates encourage constant, informal text conversation. Says 15-year-old Christina Jensen from Copenhagen: "I send and receive between five and 10 a day, mostly things like 'sleep well,' 'how'sit going' or 'see you tomorrow ' . " Popularity now seems to be spreading across the generation gap. "It is better than any answering service," says 45-year-old Rome housewife Annamaria Lovari, who lives without e-mail or a fixed-line phone. "My sons always let me know when they have arrived at their destination with a text message instead of a call."
For many texting aficionados, the practical difficulty is just part of the fun. Spelling out a message with a thumb's edge takes more time than most teenagers or young adults can afford. So users have developed their own high-speed vocabulary, a mix of all the available icons, snappy acronyms and phonetic shorthand. Although adults may be foxed, youngsters will know just what's meant by CUL8R (see you later) or QL (cool). Guides are available for the uninitiated. In Britain, three of the top 10 best-selling books are English-to-text dictionaries. A full 300-page lexicon is due out next month. Italian mobile-phone companies offer free glossary cards. But the language is evolving quicker than publishers can keep up. "The whole point is that everyone can [invent] it; it's just a visual translation of the spoken word," says Gabrielle Mander, who compiled "Wan2Tlk? Ltl Bk of Txt Msgs."
Having gotten over their initial surprise, network operators are now sharing in the thrill of text messaging. Since text takes up only a thin sliver of bandwidth, messages whiz around effortlessly even on the most con-gested networks. This makes it a high-margin business, and a welcome relief from the highly competitive market for voice calls, where profits are being squeezed. Some European telcos now derive up to 20 percent of revenues from the "thumb culture." Others are luring subscribers with package deals that include free messaging. Billboards advertising an SMS deal for France's SFR service read "Ce Of'R" (translation: "C'est offert," or "It's free"). The handset manufacturers are also catching up to this trend. The Motorola V101, due for launch in Europe later this year, is little more than a keyboard with an earpiece attached. New models that speed inputting and cut thumb strain may kick this fad into an even higher gear. "The whole notion of SMS is rerevolutionizing itself because of the easeof send-ing messages," says Motorola's Peter Kent.
Where fashion leads, commerce follows. For the marketers and admen, SMS has some rare and valuable qualities. Sometimes subscribers will be offered a special service--say, news or weather reports--in return for receiving occasional ads. "It provides the kind of access that advertisers can only dream of--zero percent waste and 100 percent reach," says Heidi Hutchison of Mediatude, a marketing research company. Already ads for everything from condoms to airlines have begun reaching subscribers through their handsets. Other SMS services range from news and traffic warnings to fertility advice and directions to the hottest beach parties on Ibiza, Europe's clubbing mecca. But there's also a risk of offending users. "Vendors are treading a very tricky line," says Tim Chen of the British telecom consultancy Analysys. "At the moment, this is a novelty. People treat their phones very personally. They won't tolerate a lot of unsolicited messages."
The runaway success of Japan's i-mode, the cell-based Internet phones, has a similar grass-roots quality to it. First introduced two years ago, i-mode was marketed as a way for corporate types to keep track of stock prices or pick up their e-mails, but the service really made it big with teenagers and young adults, who use it to download games and fortunes and send e-mail to friends. "People [in Japan] use their mobile phones to fill in 'niche time,' waiting for the bus or squashed into a commuter train, to fill those five-minute snippets," says Henry Elkington, a telecom expert at the Boston Consulting Group. Both SMS and i-mode seem to reinforce the notion that mobile phones are really about one person communicating with another. "Although the telecom companies may work very hard on corporate applications, the biggest use for phones is people telling people how they feel," says Jon Beebo, a strategist at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.
The mobile-phone firms are hoping that the success of SMS may help answer one big question about the future of wireless: what (if anything) are customers likely to want from Internet-linked smart phones, which will hit Europe and Asia in the next year or so? Phone companies have spent $100 billion on the third-generation technology that will allow these phones to send and receive vast amounts of data. What's the point of this fancy technology if customers really just want to send short text messages? Now engineers are scrambling to develop so-called multimedia messaging services, in which users would send text messages enriched with still or video images or sound clips--a sort of voice e-mail. Only when the third generation hits the market will they know for sure whether it's GR8 (great) or NAGI (not a good idea).
WITH STEFAN THEIL IN BERLIN, FELICIA CHIOU IN PARIS, KAY ITOI IN TOKYO, BARBIE NADEAU IN ROME, CHARLES FERRO IN COPENHAGEN AND MARITES VITUG IN MANILA