Why Do People Still Text
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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!
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@Dashrender said:
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.
I agree. It's always been equally formal and MS Send just exposed that, it didn't need to prove it. Since Send is presented as text, it IS text in the way that people mean the term generally. All it did was replace the underlying protocol. All formality is purely imaginary and this makes it obvious because some of the formality, like subjects, are taken away so that you can't even make it more formal if you want to.
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@anonymous said:
Also, I was told that in the US is the only place you pay for incoming messages?
That incoming messages are free everywhere else in the world?
If this is true, then there is no forced costs, just don't reply
I get unlimited texts and calls no unlimited data. Text is much similar and easier than email, and is much more instant, email servers have delays and emails aren't checked as often by most.
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@Dashrender said:
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!
And keep in mind that that's what I'm doing. SMS and Texting are horrible, people should be using IM which we had before everyone moved to Texting. And email is a form of IM, especially now. Just SMTP, XMPP and others are all optional IM carriers. SMS is too, just a really bad one that isn't on the Internet. At no point am I suggesting IM is bad, I've never said that. It's specifically leaving the Internet, going to the old phone network and using a device-centered IM system from the 1970s (paging) instead of Internet converged technologies that we've had and were dominant for over a decade is what I am opposed to.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@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.
It still does mean that. that's why you don't text everyone you email most things and text for more personal and more urgent things.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I get unlimited texts and calls no unlimited data. Text is much similar and easier than email, and is much more instant, email servers have delays and emails aren't checked as often by most.
I've measured SMS delay at roughly three hours between carriers, two people sitting at the same table in the same restaurant able to send emails "instantly" while waiting for the SMS to go through. Many times, in Dallas right in the heart of the metro.
Both have the potential for huge delay. This is actually a reason that I hate texting, it gives end users the impression of being instant but no guarantee. Email people understand is likely instant, but there is no guarantee.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It still does mean that. that's why you don't text everyone you email most things and text for more personal and more urgent things.
Except the only people who text me, at least, don't use email at all. So everything has moved to text. Anyone who has and uses email knows that that gets me faster, more reliably and with more urgency.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
It still does mean that. that's why you don't text everyone you email most things and text for more personal and more urgent things.
Except the only people who text me, at least, don't use email at all. So everything has moved to text. Anyone who has and uses email knows that that gets me faster, more reliably and with more urgency.
Then for you it has. Not for most people. You are the exception not the normal case.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I get unlimited texts and calls no unlimited data.
Doesn't need to be unlimited. You can send tens of thousands of emails, maybe hundreds of thousands, on purely free plans. The word "unlimited" is misleading as the data plans are effectively unlimited and often the plans called unlimited for text will actually have a cap.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I get unlimited texts and calls no unlimited data.
Doesn't need to be unlimited. You can send tens of thousands of emails, maybe hundreds of thousands, on purely free plans. The word "unlimited" is misleading as the data plans are effectively unlimited and often the plans called unlimited for text will actually have a cap.
I've never had a plan with texting caps. But all of them have Data Caps.
Show us where a 100% free data plan exists. -
@thecreativeone91 said:
Then for you it has. Not for most people. You are the exception not the normal case.
This seems odd. This exactly the type of case where people would tell me that but in the opposite direction.
I feel this is a common logic problem. No matter what I observe I'm the edge case. One time it's because I'm too technical. Now my circle is not technical enough.
Is it really the case that almost no one has people using text for normal communications and only for emergencies and actually use email for all normal communications? I don't feel like I know anyone in real life like this anymore. Especially no one with kids.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I've never had a plan with texting caps. But all of them have Data Caps.
Show us where a 100% free data plan exists.I already did, TMobile offers it, my dad has it. 400Mb/s month on tablets, totally free. Works great. He can't send enough emails to touch that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@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.
I'm the same way - I too have tons of people I email but don't text or call - notice I said that I will either call or get called by that person at some point. Texting is for quick, instant communications. That's the whole point, instant.
Can email be instant? Yep, and usually pretty much is - but! I don't want my phone twerking off the desk because I'm receiving 100 emails an hour (arbitrary number) so that I make sure I get the notices from those that a) feel their message needs a faster degree of response or b) I feel their messages deserve a higher degree of notice to my attention.
Can email solve this? Sure it can! If the email client can be setup to allow me to set a white list that when a message comes from a specific address then the device is allowed to tweedle at me.. otherwise it stay silent, but I'm unaware of any mobile email client that has this feature (not that I've looked). But that doesn't solve the other half where the other side feels the message is worthy of my faster attention.
I'll pick on my brother as an example - he sends me joke emails all the time - most of which I simply delete - what if he wants to get a hold of me to go out in say 30 mins? Assuming I didn't put him on my white list in email, that message would be ignored until I checked my phone, maybe not until the next day... but a text message will get my attention now.
For true emergencies - I'm now sure how someone contacts you since you said you turned ALL notifications off on your phone. Do you just check your email every 5 mins when away from your computer? Of course with your computer, you could have a widget or the full client/webpage open and on it's own window and you'd see the message pop in.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I've never had a plan with texting caps. But all of them have Data Caps.
Show us where a 100% free data plan exists.I already did, TMobile offers it, my dad has it. 400Mb/s month on tablets, totally free. Works great. He can't send enough emails to touch that.
How did he get it totally free? By having a contract for phones with them or otherwise buying something else with them. That's not really free.
