In all the fuss over technology, I wanted to take a step back and think about what the next form of messaging will be, and if we can’t do some logical thinking about it.

We all have five senses, touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell (and the arguments about there being a sixth sense too, that’s hard to explain, it’s a psychic connection, inside of your brain, so you can understand people like Shirley McClain are best left to The Animaniacs). Whatever form the next form of mobile messaging is going to be, it’s going to be using one of the first five.

While Nokia have piloted a touch screen with feedback (so that touching an on-screen key feels like a key), I think the vibrate alert on most mobile phones is about as far as we’ll get with touch – although I’m sure some enterprising programmer will come up with a morse code signaler it’s not going to be mainstream. Taste and smell are also something else I think we can safely ignore – scratch and sniff movies never made it out the drive-in 50’s movie scene, don’t expect Verizon to hail this as the next great boundary.

Which leaves hearing and seeing. So, audio, pictures, and moving images in some form or another. Seeing works for images and video is naturally a combination of seeing and hearing – plus of course we shouldn’t forget text or rich media (text, images and layout) content, which comes under seeing.

What about how it gets to your device? Well let’s talk timescales. You’re going to be having some form of communication with another person – and it’s either real time, or ‘delayed.’ So let’s take these and throw them into our senses and see what we can get.

Real Time Hearing
This should be obvious – it’s the core function of a phone, and what every single handset has to do. Important to remember that any service complements the full duplex audio of voice calls.

Delayed Hearing
An obvious way to supplement voice calls is to have an answering machine, where people can leave you messages for you to listen to at a later date. Again you’d be hard pushed to find a cellphone plan that doesn’t include voicemail in some form. And don’t forget a number of these allow you to forward just a voicemail to someone else, without actually having to phone them, Of course this is all network based, forcing you to dial in. It is possible on some smartphones to record audio, and then send that as data, so here’s one avenue that isn’t being fully exploited – although some carriers in the Far East make a great play on this.

Delayed Reading
Get some text, read it, and if you can, reply to it. Your classic SMS (Short message service) takes you to 160 characters, and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) originally took you up to 100K of textual data.

Real Time Reading
Strangely, the chat room experience hasn’t really made it mainstream on mobile phones yet, although you could argue that SMS just about manages to be real time with two people. Certainly the likes of IRC can run on devices (WirelessIRC running on Nokia S60 devices proves that to critical acclaim), but I’d regard the speed of text entry to be too slow for mortals (as opposed to 14 year olds) to do real time chat on current devices.

Real Time Watching
Video calls – the classic sci-fi of having a camera on you and conversing that way. It was demo’ed in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and the technology is on pretty much every single 3G enabled handset. It’s here, it’ll improve over time, but are we going to see an uptake on it?

Delayed Watching
Think a mix of podcasting, video calling and voicemail and you have one of the missing elements in the matrix that isn’t talked about. It’s not something that the networks provide in their infrastructure directly, but there’s nothing to stop you doing a little home recording on your hone, and then get the option to send it on to other - normally via email or MMS, but don’t discount ‘broadcast’; options such as a direct upload to YouTube.

Breaking it down into the areas like that, and you see that the actual properties of a mobile message are all pretty much covered in today’s modern devices. So looking for gaps isn’t going to find the next form of mobile messaging. After all blogs had been about, and SMS had been about, but it wasn’t until Twitter came along that the idea of ‘blogging SMS’ took hold in the technology market (and even then people are still working out what Twitter actually is).

No the future of mobile messaging isn’t going to be filling a product gap, it’s going to be exploiting the existing technology in strange ways, with new twists, and a crazed mind coupled with some VC funding to let them work on it for six months. To be honest I can’t wait to see what the next idea is going to be.