SMS and IM: "Sure, you have presence, and a roster, but the store-and-forward mechanisms of SMS enable deferred delivery, delivery reports, and, above all, they don't impose on you. No "typing" notifications or popups to build awareness that the other person is waiting for your reply - in fact, there's no real pressure to reply instantly (at least not culturally, and not in my age range here, although I understand that younger people delight in ping-ponging dozens of inane messages between each other)."

Weirdly, I was chatting to a guy from a VC earlier today about exactly this. I'd never thought of it before, but I suspect usage of SMS and IM are rather different - one seems significantly more synchronous than the other. Can one replace the other - and will users want them to? I can't exactly see them running side-by-side...?

Comments

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

Yep, two different usage patterns - offline vs. online, deferred vs. realtime. No, one is not going to replace the other - each applicable under different circumstances and times. They don't run side-by-side (for a particular interaction), but one can be the path (initiate) the other...

Enrique

[Jim Hughes]

I've been running im clients on the phone for years now, and I find the limited audience, and presence are the biggest differences that impose different styles of usage.

Offline messaging like most Jabber systems allow (Google's Gmail is the big exception), allow a fire and forget usage similar to sms. But, as you say, conversational usage is far more likely with im.

As clumsy analogues, sms and im usage on a phone can be mapped to email and im on the desktop.

[John]

I might disagree with Jim here. IM clients on the phone, because they aren't running all the time are more like email on the PC and SMS is mor like IM on a PC. The important part of instant messaging is that it is "instant". With SMS, you send the message, you can pretty much be certain that its arrived on the other persons phone almost immediately (with the fair assumption that they have the phone with them and switched ). IM on the phone - if they don't have the client switched on and connected you are out of touch, in the same way that if you were to send me an email to my home PC I wouldn't pick it up until I got home and switched it on.

My personal experience is that IM useage on phones (in the youth market at least) swiftly moves to exchanging phone numbers simply because of the immediacy referred to above. I'm not really conviced for other reasons that IM is worth investing in, and certainly if I was a well known TV dragon I'd have done a bit more due dilligence before putting my name to a mobile IM client.

[Jag]

I can agree with a lot of John's sentiment here. IM on mobile as a straight crossover of Internet IM simply will not work. For a start, there's Metcalfe's law: the value of the "network" in SMS is the greatest it could possibly be - yet with "pure" IM on mobile it will take years to get there. And the reason why in actual fact it will not take years to get there - but will *never* get there is because of a) the existence of SMS and b) the existence of an address book before IM came along. If you have to build your "buddy" list all over again it's a pain, and what's worse is if your buddies don't have IM. So whay would you bother? You wouldn't - you'd stick to SMS.

So, the clever way to do IM in mobile is to take the gerat things about IM that do *not* exist in SMS and enhance the mesaging experience to make it more conversational. It's like "SMS just got smarter". And what this means in practice is to bring in the "conversational" metaphor (threaded dialogues etc.) and add in presence. But on the latter, it is vital to not make presence a prerequisite to the conversation, because you would be ignoring the success of SMS: where all conversations are not predicated on presence. Anyway - too much on this topic to write out here - will send a copy of a white paper I did some time back on this topic.

[Marcel]

Build your buddy list all over again? If your buddies don't have IM ? Well.. I think that from the young generation, about everybody that has a mobile phone, also has msn... With unlimited internet on a mobile for as little as 10 euro's a month arising right now... it would be a huge money saver for young (and old) people, as the whole mobile thing is causing a lot of kids to run into money problems... smartphones are coming to a wider audience soon.. an audience that is used to IM (msn in particular). The problem with IM on mobile phones at the moment is : cost... 20 dollars for pocket msn??? Or for symbian phones 30 dollars for a buggy knock-off? An msn (not just any IM.. MSN ... as it is used by 90% of IM-ers (at least in europe) client that comes standard with phones is required for IM-ing to succeed on smartphones.... not a new way of IM-ing. People are used to IM-ing the way it is on their pc right now.. And building your buddy list all over ??? Integrate it into the address list... that's not so hard.. and.... when logging in to msn... it fetches your buddie list anyway.

[superlove]

Users care about getting their message delivered, and knowing if and when the message is read. They don't really care whether it's SMS or IM, or which IM brand it is (the protocol).

It would be great if there were a solution that gathered and combined the connections and presence information from these disparate services into one box.