MMS taking off? "During the third quarter of 2006, an astonishing 88 million picture messages (MMS) were sent throughout the UK'saverage, almost 1 million per day throughout July, August and September. October's total was the highest yet, with 30 million picture messages sent across the networks."

Paul from M:Metrics made a couple of really interesting observations at the last Mobile Monday: that mobile photography gets much more compelling once camera quality passes the 1 megapixel threshold, and that in many areas, mobile data usage is growing - just slowly. I don't personally expect MMS to reach anywhere near the level of SMS traffic - and why should it? It's not a straight substitute for text messaging, it's more like gift-giving than conversation in my experience.

But with WAP showing decent usage, 3G uptake growing and MMS now seeming to go beyond non-trivial levels, it looks like this mobile data thing might actually be going somewhere :) Kudos for the Mobile Data Association for tracking this stuff over the years (even if they have quietly stopped showing the graph indicating that WAP traffic has stalled since mid-2005, and replaced it with this one showing unique users).