In December 2009 global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter according to The Nielsen Company. That is an 82 percent increase from the same time the prior year, when users were spending just over three hours tweeting, updating Facebook statuses and more. It’s no secret that social networks have experienced a snowball effect in popularity. So you may be asking why I am highlighting that fact and more specifically, why I would want to talk about it on a mobile messaging blog.
Put simply, that stark rise in activity on social networks has infiltrated the mobile realm and in turn, completely changed the game for mobile messaging. And more significantly, it has changed the relationship between Internet IM and SMS.
Once upon a time, it was predicted that Internet IM would take over as THE means to communicate with others— overshadowing SMS, email and other forms of messaging. However, according to the UK Online Measurement company which surveyed a panel of 40,000 UK computer users on their computer habits, the amount of online time spent on Internet IM has dropped sharply in three years. In 2007, 14 percent of Britons' online time was spent on IM, but that has fallen to just 5 percent.
While it’s hard to pinpoint one overall reason for the drop, looking first at just how “social” Internet IM is, is a good start. For example, various Internet IM services are not compatible with each other. For example, you cannot send a message on MSN to a Yahoo! user. Nicholas Deleon has an interesting perspective on this. In his CrunchGear post “2010: The year instant messaging finally died?” he points out that a person cannot use Internet IM to reach all of his or her contacts yet one Tweet can reach all contacts.
It’s no wonder that Twitter, which uses SMS, has grown so quickly. In fact, the popularity of SMS messaging has increased dramatically over the past two years due to its ease of use, its ability to connect users regardless of preferred networks and its interworking with social networks. SMS allows users to connect to other users regardless of location, networks or platforms. In other words, SMS allows users to be more “social.”
Proving the importance of integration between social networks, Rich Communication Suite (RCS), an industry effort focused on the use of IMS for mobile communication, plans to lift SMS and MMS to a higher level. By using chat, presence, etc. they plan to enrich that experience with the lessons from IM and social networking, while still enabling anybody to communicate with anybody.
While there could be many factors contributing to the reason why Internet IM has suddenly fallen behind as a leading form of communication, when analyzing the potential reasons, one common theme definitely stands out: interconnectivity. To meet the demands of the rising popularity of mobile social networks, it seems natural that the methods by which users communicate, whether it’s SMS, Internet IM or both, must be social.
SOURCE http://www.mobilemessaging2.com/articles/35125/mobile-social-networks-change-the-game-for-instant/
