Email, SMS/MMS, and IM – Argument for a Cage Match

With Apple’s announcement of MMS on the iPhone, and more providers selling “package” deals on texts, there’s a question open regarding the future of messaging modes.

As in the world of smartphones versus desktops, there are some important changes happening which will probably change the dynamics of how SMS, instant messaging, and email are perceived to be different…or not.

In the past, SMS/MMS had the great advantage of being available on the go – because of SMS’s ubiquity and simplicity, this messaging format has become the ultimate on the go format. While SMS wasn’t extremely effective for long or “rich” messaging, it wasn’t designed to be. Of course, SMS has also generally been priced to account for this mobility – teenagers famously ran up cell phone bills equal to a mortgage payment overdo-ing it.

Email, by contrast, has been relegated to the desktop/laptop world for the most part. But of course, email had the distinct advantage of greater richness and capacity to handle something more like a letter (with attachments, etc.). Email also has the distinct benefit of having no variable cost – go crazy, teenagers.

Now throw IM into the mix – Instant Messaging has been something like the desktop/laptop equivalent of texting, with the price advantage of email. But IM had the same lack of mobility as email, until recently. You had to sit at your computer to be connected, as did your friend.

Consider the iPhone, however, and other new smartphones, and you can quickly become confused. Unlimited broadband and texting are fairly cheap with both, and IM clients like Yahoo’s are becoming freely available.

So do I text, email, or IM? Now we come down to some more subtle differences between the formats and more likely applications – and it is likely that they will merge functionally at some point. There should be a cage match between these formats in the near future.

Text – Fast transfer, but increasingly, this speed is being equalled by the other formats. Do you really want to manage messaging via a simple list?

IM – On smart phones, it is still less useful because many require you to be “in” the messaging app…when background sign-in becomes a reality, this will become much more powerful, and possibly more conversationally oriented.

Email – Basically, email is becoming a long written format – and it probably will still hold sway in this area.

But is it necessarily true that your email client, IM client, and SMS interface need to be different apps? No. In fact, what all three have in common is a message log, contact directory, and messaging authoring tool – users care little about transmission format, provided speed is there.

Let the cage match begin!