Going Backwards

Those who weren't familiar with the Blackberry Messenger service (BBM) before the recent civil unrest are probably familiar with it now. It's basically a text message service exclusively for Blackberry phones, but it's free to use. Which, I guess, is a plan that's working for RIM, the company behind the Blackberry brand, because I'm seeing people swapping BBM numbers on Facebook just as much, if not more than their mobile numbers these days.

A less successful 'brand exclusive' communication medium is Apple's Facetime. It's a method of making video calls between iPhone 4 devices. It's not quite as popular as BBM, firstly because of the restrictions (you need an iPhone 4, the other person needs and iPhone 4, and you both need to be in range of a wifi access point because it refuses to work over 3G) but also because people don't like video calls. Proof of this is in the fact that every halfways decent phone for the last five years (except the iPhone) has had video calling functionality, and people simply don't use it - even though the functionality of the universal service works between different makes of handset and also over cellular.

But Facetime and BBM both do something which I consider quite dangerous... they replace a universally accessible service with an alternative that's restricted to one make of handset. Facetime replaces video calling with a system only available to iPhone users, and BBM replaces universal text messages with a system only available to Blackberry users. It doesn't stop there... Facebook have announced an application for mobile messaging, and there are rumours flying around that Google are about to release their own closed messaging system to tie in with Google Plus.

Now, make no mistake, I strongly dislike text messages. People's attitudes towards them are wrong - if you send a message via SMS and get no reply it's far more likely that the message hasn't got to its destination yet, but many assume it's the recipient being rude. Also the cost is outrageous. It's around 10p for a single message, 140 bytes, depending on your network. That works out at £714.29 per megabyte, and to the phone company that's almost pure profit. I get 500MB per month for a tenner on my current data plan, and the phone network are making a profit out of that. The same amount of data would cost me over £357,000 to send via SMS. If you have a contract with 500 text messages, that's only actually 70K of data, so compared to your data allowance the text messages should be pretty much free. Personally I'd love to see a world in which everyone drops text messaging and starts using mobile email instead - it's cheaper by far, even if you're on a flat rate contract, it's easier to filter for spam and unwanted communications, and people know not to expect an immediate reply.

But all that said, I'd rather have text messages as they are today than go back to the bad old days. Remember when text messaging was a new thing? You could only send messages to people on the same network as you, so you had to make sure you bought a phone on the network most of your friends were on, even if that network wasn't exactly what you wanted... it was a pain in the arse. By segregating messaging systems by OS, by handset manufacturer or by social network, we're basically going back to the way things were in the bad old days of mobile messaging. And that's not a good thing.