Last month we had a great two-part post “Is Text Messaging Terminal?” (part 1; part 2). I would like to thank Paul Ruppert on his market view points on how innovative services have tried to reinvent the mistake that SMS has created.

MM2.0 is about addressing the market with a different set of components. The components provide the operational and capital savings to offset the continued growth of text messaging. MM2.0 also creates architecture for reusability between all the messaging value-added services, providing an architecture whereby the next messaging application can in fact reuse the services and functionality of the other. Lastly, not to forget the subscriber, it is about giving a level of control to the user, providing you and me the ability to personalize and define our messaging services.

As we look at text messaging forecasts, Portio’s latest numbers reset the market expectations in a continued positive growth beyond 2010. As Ruppert stated, Mobile Email did not eat into SMS, “VoiceSMS” (another marketing term for cheap voicemail) also didn’t take away from SMS. Will Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) complement or detract from the growth? Do subscribers care about Mobile Instant messaging? My latest personal research seems to indicate that subscribers that use MIM are also subscribers that text.

The pundits of texting have been hyping the rise of IM and the death of text for many years now. I haven’t seen a market anywhere yet whereby MIM has greater than 2% saturation rate. Even if MIM were to double year over year for the next five years MIM will still be less than 40% of the market and referring back to current user behavior, texting and IM do not currently negatively affect each other. I would be curious to understand take-up rates of other modality services such as “VoiceSMS.”

To be clear, I am a fan of MIM. Four years ago I was given an early prototype of the Sidekick, the Danger device, which I most proudly carried with me everywhere I went flashing it in front of mobile operators and the like. I texted like a banshee, but more importantly I was also using MIM and using quite of a lot of data around on an “all you can eat” data plan. My IM group was desktop IM subscribers and the recipients of my texts were of course mobile. The Danger at that time had a separate client user agent, and to this day still does have such a super agent because their operating system has the capability to multi-thread and multi-task well. The Danger device sadly met its fate when I clumsily dropped that first prototype on its head while engaged (open) effectively decapitating the unit. The Danger device remains one of the many devices that I have owned that has left me with a positive experience.

Today one of the devices I carry also has the ability to IM via GoogleTalk and MSN, and in retrospect I note that I still follow the defined behavior of IM and texting as I did four years ago. I have matured, but my communication profile has not yet and maybe it will take the next generation to define a different use case than mine.

Can the current lack of MIM usage and penetration be fixed with a more integrated approach to messaging that would include SMS delivery? As we noted earlier MM2.0 gives control to the user to define their messaging needs: how they want, when they want, where they want their messages to be delivered. Relevance of how to deliver the message based on the several differing aspects. Can an integrated MIM and SMS network environment tied to relevance create an environment whereby ignorance to network delivery is bliss? Do users care?

Put simply, users want to communicate with each other and they want to do that as easily as possible. Currently my communication mechanism requires that I know more than just your first and last name, but potentially a mobile number, email address, IM handle, skype ID, and soon to be released other addressing schemes that are brewing in standards bodies. On all the above my form of communication is via the written word, voice (encoded attachments), or a richer form whereby I can communicate via pictures. To send a voice note, I am limited to how I can communicate. If the message is written I am also further complicated by several addressing mechanisms that I just identified above.

Again do users care? Just to state my position: I care, I love technology tied with simplicity. We have the technology covered; we need to work on simplification by unifying the user experience a la Mobile Messaging 2.0.