Planet of the Apps

Gen TXT

The main clues about how users will interact with 3G wireless services come from sociological research into the text application known as Short Message Service (SMS). The real significance of the SMS explosion in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia over the last few years is that the industry did not predict it. "Three years ago, if you’d told me people were going to be tapping out 160-character text messages on little cell phone keypads, and that this would be huge business, there’s absolutely no way I’d have believed you," says Robert Tercek, president of applications and services for PacketVideo. This gap between industry expectation and user reality is likely to widen as the range of wireless applications widens with 3G.

In January alone, Britons sent over a billion SMS messages, amounting to a cultural phenomenon with its own jargon (one ironic viral message that circulated last year read, "Der if lyf Beyond txting. Get 1"). And from London to Helsinki to Manila, teenagers have woven text messaging into the fabric of their lives with incredible speed, in ways that the industry never predicted. Teenagers ask each other out on dates, arrange meetings in movie theaters and malls, and even organize fights. Young gay men in London use texting to flirt with each other in clubs and bars. Last year, young Filipino political activists used SMS to mobilize street demonstrations prior to President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial. Teenage bullying and political rallies have little in common. But SMS was flexible enough to enable both applications, and it’s this global flexibility that made the technology so successful, researchers say.

Sociologists and technology writers observe that young people, especially children, can integrate new technologies into their lives with an ease that can sometimes seem uncanny. A few months before his death this May, science fiction novelist Douglas Adams told a mobile commerce forum how he heard his 6 year-old daughter, who was pushing her baby carriage around the family’s garden in Santa Barbara, Calif., say the following words: "Proceed to the highlighted route." The girl had heard the phrase spoken by the GPS-enabled navigation device in her father’s car, and absorbed it seamlessly into her world.In June 2000, Adams launched h2g2.com, a WAP guide to "everything," modeled along the lines of the device portrayed in his novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Next week, Part II of Planet of the Apps.