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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> we're seeing SMS take e-mail's place for conversations.

Even with the 140 characters limits?

Even with the limits. The back-and-forth is fairly quick, and longer messages are just broken up into multiple messages. Like regular conversations though, people tend to keep it short and sweet.

But SMS is not free, right ? How do you deal with the ongoing operator costs?

Not free, but fairly inexpensive. Most US mobile plans provide unlimited SMS messaging to their customers, and many foreign ones provide free incoming messages.

For business, the value of reliable delivery, timely and increased customer engagement tends to far outweigh the costs.

> For business, the value of reliable delivery, timely and increased customer engagement tends to far outweigh the costs.

Aren't there cases when phone networks get massively congested and SMS are not delivered until hours later? Such as New Year, Natural Catastrophes, etc... in that sense Email delivery is superior because it's fully decentralized.

We did receive inquiries from companies about being able to deliver SMS messages during recent natural disasters.

Turns out that people need to communicate during calamities and often prefer text and so do services that are delivering services to these people.

That's interesting. I was going to ask a counter-point, such as WeChat or WhatsApp being more popular. Which I guess is the case in personal connections, but as SMS is, like email, federated, it makes sense for companies knowing messages get delivered (and is probably a lot more reliable than email in deliverability status reports), and there is a huge demand for that, not least regulatory and compliance (and regular customer service).

At least in the US, SMS can be up to 1600 characters on most carriers/handsets now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS

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