SMS is Dead. Here comes Facebook Chat. | Hacker News Reader

SMS is Dead. Here comes Facebook Chat.

flaviorump.ch

6 pointsflavio8718 comments

Really stupid article. Facebook Chat on the iPhone will kill SMS? What's the iPhone global penetration rate? 1%? So I'll be able to chat with 1% of my friends assuming they all arrange to run the iPhone Facebook app at the same time as me? Yeah, sounds like a real replacement for SMS.

Gah, silly.

Don't forget you can also send messages to the regular inbox, so no need to be running the app at the same time, which would, as you said correctly not exactly a way to replace SMS. As to the penetration rate, the people that I communicate 95% of the time are all on facebook. Maybe I need to add some older people to my social circle :D

actually it's 0.13%

And how many of your friends have an iPhone? I believe it's more than 0.13%.

Facebook Messenger indeed has the potential to kill SMS. And the iPhone won't be the only platform facebook will support. Now with an iPhone that has an incredible UI and easily available thirdparty apps I'm sure motorola, nokia and samsung can't just continue to ship their rather limited OS.

you are being very optimistic. You forget that even if iPhone sells 10 million iPhones in a global market it will be only the 0.3% of the whole phone market.

Actually I don't know anyone who owns an iPhone. Like you said other companies will make similar UIs before iPhone dominates.

I am sure SMS wont die at least in the next 5 or 10 years. SMS is a huge market/profit for telecom companies and a standard one and I am certain they wont let it die before they promote their are own free chat.

What's wrong with MSN and the user base is 10 times larger? It's enough to replace SMS but it never did.

I dont see anytime soon all these teens getting used to the iPhone virtual keyboard. They type with eyes closed in their classrooms, while driving the car with one hand...

What is interesting about the iPhone is, that you normally get it with an unlimited data plan. As soon as 3g is included in every plan, sms will loose it's importance. but I doubt that it will be replaced.

The keyboard issue kept me from buying one. Though at my school in Switzerland about 1% of the students already have one, even though until yesterday you couldn't get them.

Wow, it must be 2007 again. "Facebook chat is coming! Facebook chat is coming!" No one cared then, no one cares now.

Killer feature for Facebook chat is chat history? Really? My (free with contract) Verizon phone does just this with AIM. No need for a data plan.

And the iPhone does this with SMS. I'm sure the iPhone AIM apps do this, too.

So yeah: "Woo! Facebook chat!"

This article is dead on accurate! EVERYBODY on my contacts list uses Facebook because I just deleted all my business and work contacts just so I could have exclusive 1 on 1 chat with Facebook users. What insightful and well thought-out writing that was.

This article is idiotic, but the higher-level point is that people should kill SMS with applications that send messages as Internet data. This is more likely to be AIM or Yahoo messenger than Facebook chat, but with so many devices out there supporting 3rd party applications it won't be long before a large number of heavy SMS users switch to these alternatives.

Is this from the onion?

Hmm, I'm not on Facebook, nor do I have an iPhone... How is this relevant?

Oh no, someone's written something on the Internet that's not relevant to wmeredith!

You can't really expect to see a page with 28 links that are 100% relevant to you. Just ignore the stuff you're not interested in and don't waste your time on completely useless comments such as the above.

What he's saying, is that beyond our tiny sub culture of internet nerds, the average person won't be leaving SMS any time soon. The mainstream market has started getting used to that medium in the last few years and has no intention of using a 3rd party platform to replace it.

If we're speaking penetration, given smartphones as a whole, I think email has a higher chance of replacing SMS on phones than Facebook chat/etc does.

Why don't people write about Blackberry Messenger (BBM)? It's been killing SMS for a while, every single person I know is on BBM.

How many people do you know?

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