The Text Generation

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

© 2001