Standard Text Messaging Rates Apply

T-Mobile is making TaraBytes unhappy. Because the messaging bundle that offered unlimited domestic texting and pictures has mysteriously disappeared from her rate plan.

So it was off to call up the not-quite-enthusiastic customer service team and...is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a...?* The happy colors and cute tubular fonts and the “MyFaves” attitude of the brand? Well, let’s just say it’s a bit of a bait and switch. And I’m out of luck on the bundle. And when you add up all those deceptively inexpensive 15-cent charges per message inbound and out, that’s when you end up with a phone bill like mine which, well, we won’t go into.

The problem of course is that I can’t stop. I hardly ever actually talk to anyone via mobile. And oh, how did it end up this way? It seems so surreal considering that I was sitting in a bar in Nice with a friend about three years back this very week, actually—when my handset made that “you have a message” whooshing sound and I jumped about three feet off the barstool. Fortunately did not fall off the barstool, it being early in the evening. But despite the fact that I was only half a verre du vin rouge down, reading the text (from a very nice Ericsson PR person trying to schedule a meeting) gave way to trying to respond to it—which, given the predictive input language that I couldn’t figure out how to turn off ended up reading something like: “ughggsss 5 sshk.”

Fast forward and now it’s practically a way of life. And probably for you as well. Search your feelings and you will know it to be true. Plus, the people who really know can quantify it. According to VeriSign Inc.’s Mobile Messaging Index, which measures the number of mobile messages that VeriSign handles each day, the company handled a quarterly record of 43 billion messages from January 1 to March 31 - a 154 percent increase over the first quarter in 2007. By comparison, that's already 45 percent as many messages as VeriSign handled in all of 2007. Yikes.

And I don’t think we know how far the rabbit hole goes. We already text and e-mail and chat and Facebook message and in general talk less and less. But now mobile instant messaging and mobile social networking and mobile user-generated content are on their way. And texting might sing a siren call, but all those enhanced capabilities might drive some people into an unhealthy place where there’s never a need to actually speak to anyone ever again.

Oh, I know we think of such things as something the kids do, but when you factor in faster and faster networks, more broadband, easier to use devices and an open application environment, the landscape changes. And Juniper Research expects the global market for mobile Web 2.0 apps to be worth $22.4 billion in 2013, up from $5.5 billion today. “Combining the power of the social network map – namely: ‘who I know, how I know and where I know’ – with that of mobility, presents the greatest opportunity for revenue generation of any of the applications as defined within Juniper’s Mobile Web 2.0 framework,” said Ian Chard, Juniper Research analyst. “The phone is carried with us most of the time and contains a huge amount of personal data, making it a logical extension for the social network and a host of other collaborative Web 2.0 applications being mobilized.”

Actually he said “mobilised,” ‘cause he’s British and that was in a brief. And see how I used “said” interchangeably with “written.” It’s coming, my lovelies. You just wait. And you’ll look back and say “wow! That TaraBytes sure was prescient. We need to put her on our RSS feed.”

Have a different take? Text me. Oh, wait a minute, the phone bill. Just e-mail me instead: tseals@vpico.com. Whatever you do, don’t bother calling.

* If you don’t get the Wayne Brady reference, then you are sadly lacking Dave Chappelle in your life. Go ahead. Google it.

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