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Comment by bradleyland | Hacker News Reader

Let's see if I follow this:

* iMessage is going to kill SMS * iMessage is very similar to BBM * BBM has not killed SMS

How, again, is iMessage going to kill SMS?

BBM surely puts a dent in SMS usage on Blackberries, but not as much as it could. That's because it puts the burden on users to figure out that the person they want to chat with also has a Blackberry and to get their PIN from them. Unless they know both of these things, they will use SMS.

iMessage, on the other hand, replaces SMS. It's the one and only way to send text messages on the iPhone and it will avoid SMS whenever possible. Users won't even think about what underlying protocol they are using. But they may notice that texting between iPhones has nifty new features and doesn't show up on their phone bill. Apple is trying to take users out of the game. If that happens, it becomes just a technical battle that SMS can't win.

However, SMS won't completely die until all the phones are using the same federated IM protocol. We're not going to have The One True Phone any time soon so I wish they would all just swallow their pride and standardize on XMPP or whatever. If just Google and Apple did this, they could probably kill off both SMS and Blackberry. Seems to me that would be worth cooperating on.

"iMessage, on the other hand, replaces SMS. It's the one and only way to send text messages on the iPhone and it will avoid SMS whenever possible. Users won't even think about what underlying protocol they are using."

Now that is a great point. I wasn't aware that iMessage replaced SMS entirely. I assumed that it was a separate app.

I don't think the impact of it being the default method of sending messages can be understated.

It replaces SMS when the recipient has a device that supports it. Otherwise it'll just send an SMS. The send button is green for SMS and blue for iMessages. But the point is indeed that the user doesn't have to think twice about it.

So iMessage automatically figures out if the recipient has an iPhone or not? How does it do that?

Nobody knows yet, but it probably looks up the phone number in Apple's database.

It is the tight integration with the current messaging application on the iPhone that will possibly kill sms. The average user does not want to go through some 3rd-party app to deal with their text messages. If an average user sees no difference in complexity between using ATT/Verizon sms and iMessage it seems obvious which one they would choose.

BBM is not a 3rd party app, it is a core part of the Blackberry OS.

So long as iMessage remains iOS only, I don't see it severely eroding SMS usage.

Because business users don't text even a tiny tiny tiny amount of what young iPhone users do.

That's like saying "My Treo has apps way before the iPhone. Why would apps make smartphones popular if the Treo couldn't?"

(BTW, I loved my Treo)

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