No, this isn’t the story of an Essex mum who discovered that her daughter had not gone to school, eaten or slept in 4 1/2 months because she’s joined at the thumb with her mobile phone, having texted her friends with “I ain’t bovered” 3 trillion times (though that’s entirely plausible too)

Three trillion text messages is how many 2.1 billion mobile users have sent across the world in the past year. Om Malik writes about this means of communication which can only be compared with the likes of email in terms of widespread success.

The popularity of SMS parallels that of email: It is simple, easy and doesn’t need any expensive gear to send or receive. Like email, it is socialist in its usage — a cheap $50 phone can send and receive SMS messages from a luxury model, Nokia N95 and even more snobbish iPhone.

Text messaging has undeniably become a useful communication tool when we don’t have time or energy for the polite conversation sugarcoating required in a phone conversation. SMS is direct, to the point and can be as asynchronous as you like. It’s clever and enables all sorts of long distance actions like letting your mates know you’ll be late, updating your status on Twitter or even getting your Personal Video Recorder to record something for you*.

Now, all together, “We love SMS!”

[* If you've managed to get this working, do let me know! I've yet to get it working properly. ]

Just last week my tech-savvy lawyer friend Simon Halberstam posed me the following question: “Will the mobile phone replace the PC as main interface to the internet?” A question I have been recently asking myself, so here are a few musings on the topic.

First, a little history. Back in the heady days of WAP, there was a company called phone.com, which was later renamed as Unwired Planet, and then to Openwave. They were one of the first to evangelise the notion that mobiles would become internet devices and indeed the predominant internet devices.

Many others were caught up in the excitement, pouring hundreds of millions into building mobile portals. Remember the Vizavvi debacle? Zed and Genie? These grand ambitions were radically downsized as the internet bubble burst and the cold light of day set in: more and more phones sported microbrowsers but very worryingly, few people were using them – except in Japan.

A Jan 2007 ICM Omnibus Survey of the Mobile Internet showed that 21% of UK adults access the Mobile Internet to search for music, ringtones, mobile games or other forms of entertainment. Which means that 79% of people don’t. Not-so-different results have been observed in the US and in European studies.

I’m as sad a mobile geek as anybody, but I can’t see myself using my mobile (Nokia N95) as my main interface to the internet when I’m at work. Why would I, when I have a broadband-connected MacBook Pro right in front of me? If you’re poring through 82 unread blog posts like I am now, a 17 inch MacBook screen sure beats a 2.5 inch N95.

What I can see myself doing is using my mobile internet device as my main interface to my social network. I’m a recent convert to Facebook, and their mobile service works surprisingly well. And I’m not alone in liking it.

According to M:Metrics, 12.3 million consumers in the US and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile in June this year MySpace attracted 3.7 million US and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebook’s mobile audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.

Where do I see all this going? In ten years time, the desktop internet will still be the optimum device for office-bound knowledge workers. The destiny of the mobile internet is to be the natural place you go (several times a day or more) for social connection. It will also be the way to seek out the myriad tiny snippets of information (people, time, places) which spin out of this context.

[tags]Mobile devices, social network, community, Facebook, MySpace, M:Metrics, mobile phone, technology, gadgets, Taptu, Taptology, Steve Ives[/tags]