Why Do People Still Text
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller it's vendor neutral & free for everyone (at least up here, I can't recall a smartphone plan that does not include unlimited texts at minimum)
Is phone service up there free? I thought it was owned by just a couple of carriers and cost as much as it does down here. How do you, without a phone plan, access SMS?
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@scottalanmiller said:
We've lost the "paging" functionality that SMS was designed for. It was an alert system when designed. It's been used to replace email in a bizarre way that it is not good for. It's harder to use, requires managing a second set of accounts, talks to the mailbox of a device rather than to a person.... it's complicated and confusing.
I agree that it's a pain that it's a separate thing from unified communications, but what second account are you talking about? You mean the phone number? Really? Come-on. I will always want the phone number of a person I'm texting because there will probably be a point at which I want to call them, or they want to call me (and by my having their phone number in my phone allows me to have caller ID when they call). So I call bullocks on managing multiple accounts.
This is further reduced that most phones can pull contact list information from email systems that the phone attach to, centralizing the management of all of the contact information for a person - their name, phone number, email address, mailing address,etc.
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How do you go to someone's house who has a smart phone and access your SMS if you don't have a phone? Here in Texas I now lots of people who have been unable to afford phones in the last three years and texting is the thing that they lost. Once they were really poor, email (and Facebook) were the free fallbacks. Texting only seems free when you are so affluent that you don't notice that you are paying for it every month.
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@Dashrender said:
I agree that it's a pain that it's a separate thing from unified communications, but what second account are you talking about? You mean the phone number? Really? Come-on. I will always want the phone number of a person I'm texting because there will probably be a point at which I want to call them, or they want to call me (and by my having their phone number in my phone allows me to have caller ID when they call). So I call bullocks on managing multiple accounts.
I email a lot of people that I don't have their personal numbers. I don't buy this argument. By far, most people who email me cannot text me nor do I want them having my personal phone numbers. Two different things, two different purposes.
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@scottalanmiller I can't really explain why the Zeitgeist has made it so, but allow me an example:
text: hey man
email:
Subject: Plans for the weekend?
Body: How are ya man? Got anything going on? I was thinking about having a BBQ, I'll do up some ribs and y'all bring your favourite sauce and a side.I'd much rather say hello and chat a bit - it feels more like natural conversation.
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@Dashrender said:
This is further reduced that most phones can pull contact list information from email systems that the phone attach to, centralizing the management of all of the contact information for a person - their name, phone number, email address, mailing address,etc.
True, but we are relying on more and more complicated systems to cover up the fact that fundamentally it's not doing the job we wanted it to do. People are using texting as if it is email and trying hard to make it do what email has always done.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I added a new bullet:
There is no means of identifying an SMS or MMS enabled phone number. The knowledge of this is transient, due to porting, and is kept completely by the end points.
An email address is for email, we know its function. A phone number is for calling, we know its function. Using a voice identifier to mimic email behaviour is odd as there is nothing in the number that indicates if it can accept SMS or not.
While I agree this is an issue, many companies have or are working to solve this.
Several years ago when I had Sprint, if someone sent a text message to my home phone number, the provider (Sprint in this case) would read the message to whoever answered the phone.Now while this was a solution, it's definitely NOT the one I personally wanted. Instead I would rather have a rejection notice sent to my phone indicating that's not a text number.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller I can't really explain why the Zeitgeist has made it so, but allow me an example:
text: hey man
email:
Subject: Plans for the weekend?
Body: How are ya man? Got anything going on? I was thinking about having a BBQ, I'll do up some ribs and y'all bring your favourite sauce and a side.I'd much rather say hello and chat a bit - it feels more like natural conversation.
Or:
Text: hey man
Email: hey manIt's that easy. Yo ucould just as easily feel trapped saying "hey" with text to start a conversation and feeling no such need and just asking for what you want in the initial email. Goes both ways and in both cases is purely personal reactions to it and nothing to do with the protocols. Hence why just "telling" people that email is now text, like MS Send, magically fixes that.
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@Dashrender said:
While I agree this is an issue, many companies have or are working to solve this.
But why? Why would so much effort be wasted when we already have a solution and always have? This is the core question.
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@Dashrender said:
Now while this was a solution, it's definitely NOT the one I personally wanted. Instead I would rather have a rejection notice sent to my phone indicating that's not a text number.
Except it would have to be a text number in order to do that
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
But email will NEVER be used for emergency notification - so no matter what texting will always sever a better goal for this - with the phone call being the best option.
Why is that? Email is more immediate. Agreed that phone (sync com) is better than either (async com), but why would text be used for that if email is not good enough now that texting is being used when we have the least urgency?
Maybe kids use texting for the least urgency - but they also jump the instant they hear their device tweedle.
email is more immediate than texting or a call? to whom?
As an adult, I don't get notices for email. Period. I check it when I check it, after 5 PM that's about 3 times a night.
But text messages, I check when I hear the sound.
Personally text messages to from me always imply the need for a more immediate answer than an email. Texting me means - you need an answer ASAP, emailing me means - get it whenever. And of course calling me means - it's truly urgent.
I rarely call phone with whom I simply want to BS without texting them first to see if they are free. A text is much less intrusive than the call, and they are given the choice to either respond with Yes/No/Later, etc OR they can choose not to respond at all.
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This is why I am liking the MS Send change so much. Everything that people feel text is good for, MS Send exposes how email has always been there doing the same thing (short of the obvious things like @anonymous and @Carnival-Boy mentioned where you are dealing with people without Internet access whether they are other people or yourself.)
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@Dashrender said:
Maybe kids use texting for the least urgency - but they also jump the instant they hear their device tweedle.
They do that with SnapChat and Facebook too. They just react to all communications.
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@Dashrender said:
As an adult, I don't get notices for email. Period. I check it when I check it, after 5 PM that's about 3 times a night.
Sure, but you can set alerts for some things and not others, as MS Send demonstrates.
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@Dashrender said:
But text messages, I check when I hear the sound.
Why? I don't anymore because it's where the most trivial communications goes. Important work stuff goes to email. Family members talking about vacation plans all go to text. With the people using text for personal communications, how do you react to everything as if it was a page when almost nothing is?
I feel that your answer here is to be a slave to the technology - losing a lot of ground over where we were twenty years ago.
People often say that I'm tied to my devices, but I feel like I'm the one actively looking to not be. Once text is both trivial and your alert system, either everything is trivial, or everything is an alert.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
also it's much less... formal? than an email - sometimes I just want to fire off a quick message without having to title it and all the hooplah.
This is something that AJ said, but I don't buy it. SMS is the paging protocol. What is more formal than paging? What can be less formal than email? The idea that SMS is less formal than email is purely artificial. If you feel that email needs to be formal, that's an emotional change to email that you've added. Email itself doesn't have any such connotation, as MS Send as proven, right?
No, MS Send has not proven that email is less formal, it just proves that you can have a more unified communication platform that we currently have.
SMS is like a tweet - doesn't require salution, subject, etc.
Email by it's nature is a copy of the letter. It has To, CC, etc and a subject (which as we here know, is not required) and a body... this is very much a copy of a letter format, which feels more formal a text.
But you're absolutely right that it's only formal because we put that formality there in our own minds.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller it's vendor neutral & free for everyone (at least up here, I can't recall a smartphone plan that does not include unlimited texts at minimum)
Is phone service up there free? I thought it was owned by just a couple of carriers and cost as much as it does down here. How do you, without a phone plan, access SMS?
Google Voice
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@Dashrender said:
Personally text messages to from me always imply the need for a more immediate answer than an email. Texting me means - you need an answer ASAP, emailing me means - get it whenever. And of course calling me means - it's truly urgent.
Problem is, once you have people using text instead of email, that can't be the case. If it were, you'd need to answer emails all the time with the same urgency as people don't all have texting.
I appreciate that texting should mean this, but for whom is this true anymore? Only those of us who don't talk over text anymore and who is that? It can't be both. Not unless you become completely beholded to the device.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller it's vendor neutral & free for everyone (at least up here, I can't recall a smartphone plan that does not include unlimited texts at minimum)
Is phone service up there free? I thought it was owned by just a couple of carriers and cost as much as it does down here. How do you, without a phone plan, access SMS?
Google Voice
Google offers free SMS? Okay, I can see that. So you can sign into a browser at the library and retrieve SMS messages that are saved up? Or you can have it on a laptop at home and send/receive SMS?
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@scottalanmiller said:
How do you go to someone's house who has a smart phone and access your SMS if you don't have a phone? Here in Texas I now lots of people who have been unable to afford phones in the last three years and texting is the thing that they lost. Once they were really poor, email (and Facebook) were the free fallbacks. Texting only seems free when you are so affluent that you don't notice that you are paying for it every month.
Again, absolutely right - Please understand that I'm not advocating for SMS, I'm really advocating for IM, and if it integrates with email, all the better!
