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History
In 1989 Raina Fortini sent perhaps the first text message from New York to a friend's beeper in Florida. By simply turning the beeper upside down she was able to communicate with him through a short vocabulary that depended on the few numbers that could appear as letters upside down i.e. 07734 was "hello" 733 was "eel" and so on. Because the friend didn't have any other type of phone available and couldn't afford calling this very primitive but effective form of communication was born albeit with a very short vocabulary.
The first commercial SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth of Sema Group (using a personal computer) to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone (using an Orbitel 901 handset). The text of the message was "Merry Christmas". The first SMS typed on a GSM phone is claimed to have been sent by Riku Pihkonen, an engineer student at Nokia, in 1993.
The first known city-wide use of text messaging to alleviate a communication deficit during an emergency situation was implemented May 08, 2007. On Friday, May 4, 2007, an Enhanced Fujita Scale 5 (EF-5) tornado during the May 2007 Tornado Outbreak completely destroyed the town of Greensburg, Kansas. By Tuesday, a local citizen, Kim Gamble, assisted by her friends, Patty Crowell and Paula Stout, established a text messaging system to improve communications between the dispersed citizens. This system was powered by Club Texting. That day, at 10:06 PM, the first text was sent to the citizens: "Residents allowed to take in trailers at 8 am Wednesday." During the previous two days, only one vehicle had been allowed per home. There was an urgent need to recover salvageable items due to the threat of more storms. This single line of text allowed citizens to plan for faster recovery activity the following day. Without the message, they had no way of knowing trailers would be allowed. The text messaging system went on to be used for critical information such as debris removal information, hotline numbers and town hall meeting notices. Messages expanded to notification of school, church, and community events in order to keep the community together during the rebuilding of their town. In the early days following the tornado, the only alternative for communication was word of mouth. Text messaging allowed for verified facts to be sent directly to those who needed them, avoiding the rumor mill and boosting morale in a time of despair. At the time of implementation, a government agency working in Greensburg, Kansas, expressed an interest in discussing the concept during "a time of peace" to help make this a standard solution for future catastrophes. As of July 3, 2007, the agency has not followed up with this idea.
Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow takeup of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud which was possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages per user reached 35.
It is also alleged that the fact that roaming customers, in the early days, rarely received bills for their SMSs after holidays abroad had a boost on text messaging as an alternative to voice calls.
SMS was originally designed as part of GSM, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks. However, not all text messaging systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode and the RIM BlackBerry, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP.
Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion out of 2.7 Billion phone subscribers at end of 2006 being active users of the Short Message Service (SMS). In countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway over 90% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 85% and North America is rapidly catching up with over 40% active users of SMS by end of 2006. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines with an average of 15 texts sent per day by subscriber. In Singapore the average is 12 and in South Korea 10.
Text messaging was reported to have addictive tendencies by the Global Messaging Survey by Nokia in 2001 and was confirmed to be addictive by the study at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 2004. Since then the study at the Queensland University of Australia has found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or internet, and is equivalent in addictiveness to cigarette smoking. The text reception habit introduces a need to remain connected, called "Reachability".
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