Facebook Is Killing Text Messaging 270
An anonymous reader writes "We've heard many times and from multiple sources that text messaging is declining. There are multiple reasons for this (BlackBerry Messenger, Apple's iMessage, and even WhatsApp), but the biggest one is Facebook (Messenger). Facebook is slowly but surely killing the text message. As a result, the social networking giant is eating into the traffic carriers receive from text messaging, and thus a huge chunk of their revenues."
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah. Because no-one listen to your SMS messages ...
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Listening != data mining
You're right. Listening is worse.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like when Target told a dad his daughter was pregnant [citypages.com]?
Also, you loose nothing. If something is loose you should tighten it as not to lose it. Although I guess in this case you sort of did lose a loose customer.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
But Target didn't stop the creepy target marketing -- it just got sneakier about it.
"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."
The author of the article says it's creepy, but actually I think it's clever and discreet.
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Jack up the price of a data plan (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it's hard to compete with free.
Of course you can. You can jack up the minimum price for a smartphone data plan so that it's more expensive than unlimited texting, forcing cost-conscious customers onto dumbphones.
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no, its not. sms are nearly free for carriers, as they consume very little ressources in the network. They just make very much profit of them. So they could offer them for free and make profit only with calls / with contract fees.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing people say that SMS messages are effectively free for the carriers, but such statements don't present the whole picture, and as a result, are highly misleading.
Yes, text messages are sent using junk parts of packets that aren't used for anything else. However, there are a limited number of time slots per frequency, and a limited number of frequency slots. Therefore, it is a scarce resource. If text messages were free or nearly so, there is the danger that your text messages would be delayed by hours because of the backlog, making them early useless.
When a backlog does occur, there are only three ways to fix it: add more bandwidth (which costs money), change phones so that they can deliver text messages using data traffic (which effectively takes bandwidth from other things, eventually resulting in the need to add bandwidth, which costs money), or charge a fee so that fewer people send text messages, thus avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
So it is no more "nearly free" than biodiesel made from restaurant grease is nearly free; initially it may seem that way, but as soon as demand builds up, suddenly there's not enough to go around, and the cost of increasing the supply makes it largely infeasible to do so.
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You have a valid point - to a limited degree.
I use SMS heavily at times. Multiple conversations, outage reports, server health monitoring, etc. and I can use several hundered a day easily. Even if each ~160 character message takes 50 times more bandwidth as data traffic than it's actual size and I'm looking at a few MB for the day. Yet if I paid individually they'd charge me ~$50 or more.
So yes, it's possible carriers have had to expand or change how they handle SMS to manage the increased number sent, b
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A thought occurs: If the prices of sms were extremely cheap (about $ 0.001), would the increased sms usage eat into voice usage to the point where some of the US capacity issues disappeared?
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In the US, don't most People who text usually get an unlimited plan?
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Yes, but I think a lot of people are still stuck on legacy family plans from 2004 or so, so they're paying per message still. Unlimited text messaging has been $5/mo for about 6 years now, and in the last 4 years most single user/phone plans that have data also have unlimited SMS. To buy a new phone on a new plan these days, you'd almost have to go out of your way to pay-per-SMS unless you're a cheap bastard trying to avoid paying carrier's SMS tax.
My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to a
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
$5/mo for unlimited texting? Not from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile. It's a $20/mo add-on from VZ, AT&T and Sprint, or a $10/mo higher plan from T-Mobile.
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If you buy your new phone at a Verizon store (not some discounter) they will grandfather your existing plan. I have unlimited data on my Galaxy Nexus :).
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Your roomate sounds smart. Since they charge you for inbound texts, that makes sense. Paygo is way better than contract if you use your phone as a phone and dont have diarrhea of the mouth. The paygo I am on is 5/minute, 2/text, 10/mb. Your $5 example would be 250 texts.
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Tell him to sign up for Google Voice. It'll convert SMS to email and its free. He can also send SMS for free, too, then.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
An unlimited texting plan on AT&T is $20/mo, and on Verizon, the $5/mo tier only gets you 250 messages. The $10/mo plan gets you mostly unlimited texting. So, people are deciding "hey, everyone I text is on FB, and I can ping them on their phone the same way. Plus I can ping people who don't even have phones and are sitting at home."
So, it's more flexible, and it's cheaper. People then drop their unlimited data plans (which are add-ons and not part of the contract structure), which eats into the planned revenue for the carriers. What's worse, the carriers have no plan to recoup this fee once it's gone. They'll need to make up the shortfall by increasing data plan costs.
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An unlimited texting plan on AT&T is $20/mo, and on Verizon, the $5/mo tier only gets you 250 messages. The $10/mo plan gets you mostly unlimited texting. So, people are deciding "hey, everyone I text is on FB, and I can ping them on their phone the same way. Plus I can ping people who don't even have phones and are sitting at home."
Depends on the carrier, I suppose. There are some US carriers (think Boost, for example) who offer unlimited texting included in the base package.
In the rest of the world, it's almost a given that your texting will be that low. I pay $5/mo for unlimited international texting on my plan. And I have European friends who think that I'm being gouged at that rate.
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Quite right.
Facebook isn't killing text messaging, it's just giving carriers an excuse to.
See also who kills people, guns or other people.
Answer: people, the gun is just something they use to shoot with and without a gun they'd just use a knife instead.
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No phrase in human history has been more misinterpreted than "the right to keep and bear arms", btw.
Agree with the rest of your post, but not this.
The most mis-interpreted phrases in human history are any where people preface with "The Bible says..." or "The Koran says..." Using the 2nd Amendment of the USA to suit various agendas is nothing compared to that.
Cough.... (Score:3)
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050811/41139012.html [en.rian.ru]
The law in Russia is extremely conservative compared with that in the United States. Russians can only buy smoothbore hunting rifles of minimum 80 centimeters, gas pistols, or revolvers shooting rubber bullets. Safe use of this arsenal for five years allows purchase of a twin rifle or carbine. Stub-barreled firearms are a taboo for Russian citizens.
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With a gun, you can point and click, and the person is dead before you've really realized what's happening.
Unless it's a shotgun, if you "point and click", you're likely to wound and incapacitate a person, but not kill them. The idea that people drop dead as soon as a small piece of lead comes in contact with them is BS that mostly stems from the movies. In reality, unless you shoot them in the head (and sometimes not even then), it takes several bullets to kill a person, and even then it's not a certainty.
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its an excuse to raise prices. Its scam. I don't see a decrease with all the people i know, and its increasing if anything.
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Carriers are a dying business model. It's no coincidence that Skype on iPhone was clipped to ensure it didn't operate on 3G. It's merely a matter of time before the carrier model either changes or gets pushed out and with microsofts acquisition of Skype I'd imagine within a few years all that carriers would charge for is data usage. All hail 4g!!!
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Blimey. You really have given this some thought. If I were in charge I can think of a hellava lot of things to do before I got to SMS's.
I think I might start with Lawyers...
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The rates carriers charge for SMS just shows how much strong, strong regulation is needed. If I were in charge, I would mandate that each carrier send a letter to every former and current customer who had pad an SMS fee, stating that the SMS fee represented price gouging because the SMS messages don't actually cost the carrier anything, as well as illegal monopolistic practices, since all the carriers colluded to raises these prices. I would then mandate that each carrier refund any and all SMS fees paid, with the amounts to be multiplied by a factor of 3 as a form of punative relief. I would further change the regulations such that if the carrier ever wanted to apply for spectrum licenses again, they'd need to multiply by a factor of 100 instead of 3.
Of course this would put the carriers out of business, but someone could buy the spectrum and infrastructure in bankruptcy court, and hopefully they'd learn a lesson.
SMS's are only "free" to the carriers in the same way that voice calls are "free" - once they've built the infrastructure, there's no incremental cost to send SMS's (or make a voice call), until the volume exceeds the capacity of the switch.
It doesn't matter if plain text SMS's ride in a control channel that would be there anyway - that control channel wouldn't be there unless the carrier put up a tower, paid for spectrum, etc. And they need to ship those SMS's to the customer who could be anywhere in the c
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Not for me. Facebook sucks for messaging compared to iMessage or plain old texts.
At best, facebook is an email supplement
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
At best, facebook is an email supplement
How can Facebook messaging even be compared with email? Can you exchange messages with people who do not use one company's services? Can you run your own Facebook message server?
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
yes
https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=224049364288051 [facebook.com]
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When a site has ~800 million active users, you can generally expect that the person you want to communicate with is using that company's services
Considering that there are an estimated 2.25 billion people who use the Internet, I would say that with 800 million users, the probability that the person you want to communicate with is actually on Facebook is a little more than 1 in 3...
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Also a lot of people, such as myself don't check Facebook very regularly. I actually find facebook to be an inconvenient form of communication most of the time. I think of it more as a self maintaining address book.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. This article is attributing to facebook what is a result of a: general market shift away from ridiculously overpriced messaging, and b: a result of simply better services that are out there, such as anything that does text messages over data, including google voice and that apple messenger thing.
Facebook's total influence on text messaging is probably neutral entirely, due to enabling people to get notifications via text messaging.
Wasn't that the plan? (Score:2)
I seem to recall something along the lines of Facebook buying out certain companies for the explicit purpose of killing SMS text messaging.
What a choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a choice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook IM is just the gateway drug... As soon as people realize that text messaging should essentially be free, they're just seconds away from installing another IM client on their phone. Most people won't, because they don't need to communicate with anyone outside their Facebook friend list... But the idea should be planted :-)
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Rediculous markup (Score:5, Interesting)
SMS has a ridiculous markup, in the thousands of percent - sorry, telcos, but the gig is up. You've had your free lunch and it's over, how about instead you give us better data options so you can at least make some money out of all these free services?
Face it - SMS and phone calls are a dying business, data is the future so invest in your infrastructure, encourage its use and profit from the fact that nobody's likely to offer free universal data any time soon.
Re:Rediculous markup (Score:5, Insightful)
actually it's infinity percent markup since SMS costs telcos nothing at all...
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there you go.
I disabled sms on my phone since I refuse to take part of a money theft operation.
telco's take money for something that rides along with the radio signals, used or not!
that bothers me. a lot.
so, I refuse to pay even a dime for sms 'service'.
its actually the biggest con in the game. (shakes head, not quite understanding the draw of this vs universal email that is just about as fast and just as easy to use.)
Moving texts between cell sites (Score:5, Insightful)
SMS costs telcos nothing at all
...to transmit, as text messages are stored in an otherwise unused field of the GSM keep-alive packet. But maintaining the software and backhaul network for moving these 160-byte packets around from one cell site to the next does cost greater than zero.
Re:Moving texts between cell sites (Score:5, Funny)
let epsilon be greater than zero
Re:Rediculous markup (Score:5, Funny)
actually it's infinity percent markup since SMS costs telcos nothing at all...
Great, now let's tunnel IP over SMS and get infinite, free data bandwidth
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Re:Rediculous markup (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rediculous markup (Score:4, Interesting)
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While SMS pricing structure may be a cash cow, I really don't think its fair to say it costs them nothing. There may be no (or few) running costs associated with it; however, there are hefty baseline fees with maintaining the structure that is used. Just because they would maintain this anyway is not a reason to allow it to be free. That would be like saying fast food places should have to give away soda because they are makingf all this money on food and the soda doesn't cost them much anyways.
SMS may n
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Despite my above post, I do actually agree with the opinion that sending and receiving a message does cost a sum of money greater than zero as you have to take into account the cost of building and maintaining the network. So what if it uses a part of the signal that otherwise goes unused, it still costs money to keep that signal broadcasting 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. To the guy above who feel's he's being ripped off for this, I wonder if he keeps his home connection running 24/7, or his telephone
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Well done, you've managed to sum up the article even more succinctly than the summary by using an analogy. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is exactly what's happening here, people are using other, free or cheaper services such as Facebook Messenger instead of SMS. Clap clap for you.
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SMS has a ridiculous markup, in the thousands of percent - sorry, telcos, but the gig is up. You've had your free lunch and it's over, how about instead you give us better data options so you can at least make some money out of all these free services? Face it - SMS and phone calls are a dying business, data is the future so invest in your infrastructure, encourage its use and profit from the fact that nobody's likely to offer free universal data any time soon.
A couple of thoughts:
The cost of producing something only determines if it will produced, based on what people are willing to pay. Since people are willing to pay for SMS carries sell it; at a price that people are willing to pay.
While the current delivery methods for SMS and phones may be dying; the need for them isn't. I also don't think the free model as in Skype can sustain itself if it became the predominate model; rather Skype wouldld push people to pay plans for non-Skype to Skype calls if only to
Don't worry about the mobile carriers (Score:5, Interesting)
They're getting paid. Facebook replaces messaging because people are using it through their smart phone. So they're paying for data plans.
They should get worried if people stop buying data plans.
Re:Don't worry about the mobile carriers (Score:4, Interesting)
With the fact that the data plans are so small for phones (just doing a round of Windows updates and application updates on a laptop will put me over cap if I had a phone plan dating from 2010 or newer.), the carriers are making in the money even with people that have unlimited texting.
Before I picked up an iPhone, I paid $75 a month. With the iPhone, I easily pay $200/month.
Texting isn't where you will end up being robbed, it is the data plans and the paltry bandwidth quotas.
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My iPhone 4S has a monthly plan of 250 daytime minutes, unlimited evening/weekends, free calls to other local phones on the same carrier, visual voice mail, call display, 2000 outgoing text messages, and 6 GB data.
It costs $65 a month, $10 less than your pre-iPhone bill. And this is in Canada, a country considered one of the worst when it comes to rip-off level cell phone plans.
What country are you in, and what the heck do you have on your plan that it costs $200/month, and will put you over cap for a singl
Re:Don't worry about the mobile carriers (Score:5, Interesting)
A facebook message consisting of 160 characters would be less than 1kB (amortised). The usual cost of an SMS is between 10c and 25c. 10c per kB equates to $100 per MB.
In other words, telco profit margins on SMS when compared to FB messages are orders of magnitude smaller. It might be even worse, I've heard that SMS messages are sent in some form of "control" packet hence the 160 char limit, meaning that SMS overheads are (somewhat) essential to running the mobile network.
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X2 the price as you pay for both ways.
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Not really, in most countries you do not pay for receiving calls or texts.
Re:Don't worry about the mobile carriers (Score:5, Informative)
In the US you do. It was accepted on phone calls when cell phones first came out, because the caller does not pay extra to place the call as they do in some countries (if I understand correctly). This was more acceptable since I have the option to not answer a call. With text messages, however, I don't have the option to not get one. In the US, I don't know of any company that doesn't charge for incoming texts, but some do charge less for incoming texts than outgoing.
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Wow, you're getting royally screwed (as if you didn't know already). My condolences.
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But we have to cover a greater area with fewer people than Europe and and and...
Oh fuck it we just love money.
No, they'll hate this for sure. (Score:2)
They're getting paid. Facebook replaces messaging because people are using it through their smart phone. So they're paying for data plans.
No way it offsets. Even if you got ass-pounded with some $0.25/MB data charge, that SMS message is less than a kB. We're talking a tenth of a cent of data per SMS at worst, maybe less, for the worst data plan imaginable.
On the other hand, the carriers typically upcharge $10-20 for text plans, or $0.05-0.10 per SMS. SMS plans were definitely their cash cow, and the d
Earnings from sms? (Score:2, Interesting)
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Further more, how would a data driven app displace a cellular function??? Text messaging uses less power and resources on my phone. I can text all day long but if have to be connected to the internet to use facebook, I get far less life out of my battery. I don't get why people would prefer a data app over a native cell feature...but that's just me.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
SMS messages are routed over control channels, which in most cases means that there is practically zero additional cost for the carrier.
So, no, the failure to use text messages doesn't change carrier revenue. The failure to extract money makes a lot of difference for carrier revenue... which is what happens if you no longer get a texting plan, or if like me, never had one and stop sending the ~10 messages per month I have been doing.
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Because it's free. I use Google Voice as my primary number now. Texting would cost me $10/month extra. With Google Voice, I can text all day long for "free" on my included data plan. I get by on the 200MB plan and rarely pass 150MB, even with Trillian for Android on MSN, AOL, Facebook, and Google Talk, Google Voice, and e-mail connected 24/7. Cell phone cost on texting is RIDICULOUS! I have a 900Minute family plan with about 3000 roll over minutes banked, unlimited mobile to mobile, and 200MB data. .
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So, if you have a phone plan that includes unlimited text messages, but don't use them as much now, wouldn't that be ADDING to the teleco's revenue?
No. Revenue is the same, whether you use the service or not. If customers are not using an unlimited service that is included in their plans, it reduces the provider's costs (very slightly), which might improve earnings, but would not increase (or decrease) revenue.
Cutting traffic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly how is facebook cutting traffic for the carriers? If I send a text message via FB versus the sms application in my phone, are not the same amount of bytes being transferred? Actually, the FB transfer probably uses more traffic.
What is true, though, is that SMS is a private service that the carriers gouge the public on in pricing and they haven't found a way to exploit the user who uses FB for their texting. At least not yet.
Re:Cutting traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly how is facebook cutting traffic for the carriers? If I send a text message via FB versus the sms application in my phone, are not the same amount of bytes being transferred? Actually, the FB transfer probably uses more traffic.
You got that right. SMS uses virtually no traffic for the carrier, it is well above 99% profit. Facebook isn't hurting their traffic - it is actually increasing their traffic. Rather, it is hurting their bottom line because they can't get away with marking up data rates to the degree they can mark up text rates. This "story" is basically just the carriers whining that their profit margins are decreasing because they got too comfortable with the obscene returns they were getting from text messages.
No huge chunks in Europe (Score:4, Informative)
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The first 5000?
I can honestly say that I haven't sent 5000 text messages in my entire life.
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Re:No huge chunks in Europe (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm in my early twenties and I feel like I'm getting old. I miss the '90s when people actually spoke to other people in the same room as them. It seems like everyone was more relaxed, or maybe that's just the economy these days, I don't know. But back in the day, if the conversation lulled, someone would change the subject instead of everyone folding their hands in iphone/android prayer u
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What the heck do they talk about so much? 5200 messages a month sounds completely ridiculous!
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Clearly you aren't a teenage girl. I worked with a girl in 2006 who had just graduated high school and was in community college, she would send something like 1200 texts a week. 20 friends x ~15 simultaneous conversations, with all the "lol"s and "wut r u doing?"s and "im bored"s each using their own message, plus response, general drama etc... adds up. I probably sent 1200 "text messages" a week over AIM when I was in high school. It's just that mobile phones didn't exist yet for my age group, nor did thei
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I'm guessing in Sweden, you also buy your own phones? In my opinion, the biggest problem with the US market is that phones are included with all your plans (at least from the 4 major carriers). I bought my last phone outright. It was the Google Dev Phone 1 (Unlocked TMobile G1). Did I get a discount for providing my own phone? Nope. Should I have, since I didn't have them pay for it for me? Absolutely.
TMobile I believe finally offers a bring-your-own-phone discounted rate, but they also have weaker c
Facebook = (Score:2, Insightful)
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developed by a narcissist for advertisers, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies (in no particular order)
FTFY
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wait for may 19 / your xmpp day (Score:2)
twitter app? (Score:2)
I don't text FB or tweet, but wouldn't the destroyer of SMS be the twitter smartphone app, not FB? Isn't twitter via app closer in concept to SMS than FB?
Could be an argument for the FB borg adsorbing everything trivial and mundane, this specifically looking at messaging being adsorbed..
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Twitter is impossibly hard to follow on their website, especially long drawn out conversations, and its not terribly private, which is important in high school drama. SMS is just a poor replacement of instant messenger, but it's already preinstalled on all phones so the barrier to entry is low. FB messenger is also already preinstalled on most phones, as well as any computer with a web browser, and doesn't cost money. It's important to look at SMS as an instant messaging service, not a broadcast web service
What? Why? (Score:2)
The facebook app is terrible for general messaging.
What is more likely killing texts are apps like whatsapp, kakaotalk, and others like that.
They're generally seamless where facebook is far more intrusive.
not to mention you can more easily send photos and videos with the other apps than you can with facebook.
Data Plans.... (Score:2)
Board meeting at carrier (Score:2)
CEO: Listen everyone, today we will create a service that will charge a hundred times more to send only a few bytes, less than 200 bytes.
Board: But anyone can do it almost for free through the Internet!
CEO: So our true cost here will be to keep the internet from the users as much as possible. We have to use every weapon available: charge too much, give them horrible smartphones, have phone makers in our hands, etc.
Board: Hey, Apple and Google released smartphones allowing anyone to write an app for it.
CEO:
what proof that fb is a bigger reason than any oth (Score:2)
i would think gtalk being on every single android phone by default is a pretty big reason. as well as things like google voice having free sms. fb messenger seems like one reason, but zdnet just seems to be speculating that it's the biggest reason
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I had this conversation with my friend the other day. I noticed most of my friends falling off gtalk, and asked my buddy about it; his response was "well, I still leave gtalk running, but mostly only talk to you and (other good friend) on it. everyone else is on fb messenger these days, in particular girls" which sort of sold me on the idea. Gtalk had critical mass for a few years, but the male:female ratio is about 1:1 on facebook, and most everyone you know on facebook already has the chat app installed e
and nothing of value... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, the profits the carriers were getting from text messaging were artificial anyway. Surely they realized that. Text messaging uses otherwise unused bandwidth at the cell site and is *way* overpriced for the value received. It was a glitch in the wireless revenue stream that any savvy provider would realize will go away at some point.
Facebook on a wireless device does use up data plan, which can also be expensive, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than texting. It's evolution in action.
I wait with bated breath for the carriers to lobby for protectionist legislation. Perhaps a surcharge on data plans to cover the lost revenue from people abandoning texting.
cost compared to SMS (Score:2)
I am sure this has nothing to do with the alleged high cost of SMS compared to the cost to Tweet.
Facebook Messenger (Score:2)
Too much junk on Facebook (Score:3)
A friend of mine with an active social life used to be heavily into Facebook, and the way to reach her was to send to her Facebook account. Then she got an iPhone. After a month or so, she started checking Facebook only once a day, and told me to use SMS or email if I needed a quick response.
You can't pull out your smartphone for every Facebook update. Most of them are effectively spam.
Good! Finally! (Score:2)
Considering just how widely abused SMS messaging is--both by people who use it when they really shouldn't, and the phone companies who charge much more per-message than they have any reason to--and how much of a pain-in-the-backside the protocol is to work with (requiring little short of a full PBX gateway to interface it with a computer), I'm quite inclined to jump for joy at this finding.
On the downside, a decent data plan is even MORE expensive, and the messaging protocols are fractious and often both pr
Hope you have a good data plan. (Score:2)
Wired has a lot more spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
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