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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002One more note before bed. From the article in my previous post: "In particular, analyst Seybold argues, carriers need to move quickly to integrate SMS with instant messaging"
If I didn't know better, from that statement I would dismiss Seybold as a crackpot.
I use VoiceStream, and they have supported AOL Instant Messenger for some time (supposedly MSN will forward messages to my phone, but only when I am not signed in anywhere, and I've not yet had anyone try it). The user experience for instant messaging on a normal cellular phone is worse than SMS. It has all of the drawbacks, and adds a new one: people expect instant responses to IMs. It's a re-hash of the WAP scenario: users will say "Gee whiz, that's a neat feature", attempt to use it once or twice, realize that it sucks, and never use it again.
Carriers need to focus on what customers will actually use. IM is something that can be safely ignored for standard cellular phones. PDA Phones and data-oriented devices can utilize the data networks to provide IM functionality without additional support from the carrier.
Via Reiter, a pointer to an SF Chronicle article titled "U.S. not getting wireless message." It makes some good points, especially regarding the lack of cross-carrier messaging as a barrier to adoption. Frankly, I do not understand why US carriers deployed SMS-style messaging at all prior to establishing interop. As if I would know if someone's phone is on the same network as mine!
Overall, I am completely pessimistic when it comes to consumer-oriented wireless messaging in America, particularly of the Phone-to-Phone variety. The article notes that pricing is a significant factor in the gap between SMS adoption here vs. Europe / Asia. However, they completely miss the larger cultural aspect: Americans are interrupt-driven. We are used to our phones ringing at any moment for the most trivial of reasons, and we accept that as a part of life. Other cultures are not so accommodating, and SMS is their solution to communicating without being intrusive.
I don't see anything on the horizon capable of driving Phone-to-Phone SMS-style messaging in the US to European or Asian levels. Danger's HipTop might stand a chance, given that it sports a keyboard while maintaining an appealing form-factor and price-point, but that device has been vapor nearly as long as Microsoft's SmartPhone platform. SmartPhone does nothing to advance two-way messaging beyond providing a prettier face. Treo-like devices (which combine PDA, Phone, and a mini-keyboard) will see limited consumer adoption, period. The Treo may be best-of-breed, but it's still too big and too expensive for the average consumer. Handspring's track-record suggests that they couldn't ramp-up quickly to meet strong demand for the Treo if it were it to occur. RIM's BlackBerry is designed for an extremely narrow business market.
"Other-to-Phone" messaging seems better aligned to US consumers, if only it were being utilized. Why doesn't Outlook send an SMS every morning summarizing the schedule for the day and pending tasks, and a reminder SMS as scheduled meetings approach? Why doesn't Muvico send an SMS every Friday morning with a list of new releases and possibly their schedules? There are countless ways that businesses could "reach out" to consumers via SMS, providing desired information in an acceptable manner. In Germany, Deutsche Bahn has a great mechanism for retrieving train schedules, and I can think of plenty of other examples.
Of course, such services are readily subject to abuse. Mobile Spam is the last thing that consumers want, on any continent. A safer approach might be for the phones themselves to provide functionality for "subscribing" to information on the Internet and downloading it on a scheduled basis. Think of it as offline WAP. Avantgo essentially does that on most PDA platforms, I imagine that they can easily support SmartPhone (Palm-based phones are already supported).
Scratch my plans to use the .NET Compact Framework for PDA development. It is totally not there yet. Microsoft's commitment for a 1.0 release is "by the end of the year." I have reason to believe that it will ship much sooner than that, however, it will still be too late for my immediate needs.
Steve Jensen makes a point against:
[T]he API isn't designed to be exposed in a particular way. If you choose to only use HTTP Authentication, then you lose transport independence...
None of the relevant CMS APIs specify HTTP as the sole transport. An implementation that used SMTP would be perfectly valid.
Transports are irrelevant. All your API are belong to us.
