Simon’s Blog

SMS texting is big business. There are hundreds of billions of SMS text messages sent around the world every year. In fact, SMS is so big that it’s begun to actually change languages. Here’s an example. Amongst some teenagers, the new word for “cool” is “book”. As in, “Wow, PGR 3 on the Xbox 360 looks really *book*”. Why? Because, with Nokia’s implementation of T9 predictive text input, when you key in the numbers 2,6,6 (which you would type for both the words “book” and “cool”), the first option in the list is “book”. So people just leave the word set at “book” because they can’t be bothered to change it to “cool”.

In this case, the SMS text tools on phones work fine - they’re actually the agents of change in the use of language. However, another trend amongst teenagers is to deliberately mis-spell words. For example, “*Skool* is really boring” or “*Mi* iPod nano is scratched”. If you use T9 predictive text input, the tools on many phones make it a bit awkward to mispell words. In fact, it’s so bad that there’s a trend to just use regular “long-hand” input, so people can spell words the way they want to. And, if you add in people’s desire to personalise their typing by automatically subsituting individual letters or groups of letters with (animated) graphics of their choosing (as can be done in MSN), then it seems to me there’s a big opportunity for the phone makers to up the stakes in terms of cool SMS messaging.

Who’d have thought there’d still be room for innovations that could drive use of plain old SMS (and related data)…