“Over the next one year, SMS services are likely to see so many enhancements as to be almost unrecognisable from their current form.”

Kashminder Singh

I dropped over at the 3GSM conference in Singapore last month to take a quick look at what the hottest topics among mobile operators were. It looks like mobile instant messaging will be the next big thing, judging from the concerted efforts being made by this worldwide telco operators association.

The 3GSM association is pushing to make instant messaging interoperable among different operators, messaging applications and phone models.

It looks certain then that messaging services like mobile IM and even MMS will become increasingly popular but it’s not time to write off SMS just yet. Text messages have earned lots of money for mobile operators over the years and analysts say that SMS will continue to be a major earner for telcos for the next few years at least. Most forecasts say that there are still billions to be made by telcos from text messaging.

That’s reassuring news because I love the SMS platform. It has a bit more immediacy than emails but is not as intrusive as phone calls and instant messaging. However, I admit there have been times when I wished that SMS services could do more than what’s offered now. The SMS platform, despite it being a profit churner, has seen no major upgrades since its arrival quite a few years ago.

Happily, things are about to change. It looks like my prayers have been answered and we will soon be able to look forward to a whole new range of SMS services. A number of companies have been working to enhance the SMS services you and I have grown familiar with. Apparently, this has been no easy task because the current SMS messaging platform was designed for one to one communications between users. The only way enhancements could be made without paralysing the system from overload was to build new servers and software virtually from scratch

Over the next one year, SMS services are likely to see so many enhancements as to be almost unrecognisable from their current form. The caveat is that I cannot guarantee that we will see all these enhancements. Vendor has created their own versions of these new SMS systems so a lot will depend on which particular vendor your telco selects for the upgrade of their messaging system. Anyway, here are some of the many changes we can look forward to.

Have you ever felt the need to have an auto-reply function to your text messages? Maybe you want to vary the message for different contacts? That’s going to be possible soon when next generation SMS enhancements arrive.

The feature I am going to love the most is group SMS. That’s when you would be able to send one message to a group and when someone in the group replies it goes to everyone in the group. Very much like instant messaging where everyone you invite can see and join a conversation. This is going to be extremely useful to small businesses, friends and families.

Here’s one feature kids may not like: parental control. During exam times, for example, parents could prevent their kids from receiving and sending text messages. Or they could set their kids phones to only receive SMS messages from a white list of approved contacts. Blacklists would also be possible.

Another feature I’d die for would be the ability to send self destructing text messages. These text messages would self erase after a specified time period. In the same category, I suppose would be secret SMS messages which could only be read by intended parties. Again very useful for businesses and, shall we say, certain naughty people.

These enhancements are certainly nice and long overdue but users would have to be prepared to pay more too. Some of the enhancements will only be possible over GPRS/EDGE/3G/WAP and there would be added data charges. Furthermore, these enhancements would be marketed, at least initially, as premium services which mean users would pay higher SMS charges for these kinds of text messages.

Nevertheless, I for one, can’t wait for these enhancements. I hope it happens fast, I’m already building a list of people to send those self destructing messages to.

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