Monday 02 January 2012

SMS Usage Declines Over Xmas    [ 02-01-2012 19:48 ]

Author: Oleg Kononosov   Source: NYT     Translation by: Paul Smith     

The end of every year brings with it the usual plethora of numbers and trends and this one from Finland is perhaps the most interesting I have seen so far. The Finnish mobile networks noticed a curious phenomenon as 2011 ended: SMS usage declined. As anyone who has followed the mobile space for any length of time will know SMS has seen almost consistent growth since it first appeared back in the stone age of mobile technology. Yet Finnish network Sonera saw just 8.5 million texts sent on Christmas Eve. A year earlier on Christmas Eve 2010 the figure was 10.9 million. The same trend could be seen at other Finnish networks and in other countries too. Christmas texting in Hong Kong was down 14% from the previous year and Australia's Telstra saw a 9% decrease in texting across the whole of 2011.

There is no hard data yet to pinpoint an exact reason for this decline, but even so the main reason would seem fairly obvious. Social networking. With both Facebook and Twitter more popular than ever and more and more people owning smartphones and tablets it seems like an educated guess to conclude that these services would have some impact upon SMS at some point. Not that any of this means SMS is in a death spiral or anything like that. Indeed the American networks saw an increase in SMS usage over the festive period. What it does signal though is that SMS may have reached a plateu and that with other means of quick and easy communication available SMS is no longer the obvious choice.

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Both Android & iOS Data Usage Declined As 2011 Ended    [ 02-01-2012 19:39 ]

Author: Oleg Kononosov   Source: Net Applications     Translation by: Paul Smith     

It was only a few days ago that ComScore's last set of figures for 2011 showed the smartphone world maintaining the status quo: Android and iOS dominating with RIM continuing to nosedive and everyone else pretty much irrelevant. Fast forward to the opening days of 2012 and Net Applications is showing a decline in data usage for both Android and iOS, whilst BlackBerry, and more surprisingly Symbian, showed increases.

The numbers show the increase or decrease in internet usage on different platforms for the past year. Note the last two months of 2011 in the chart below. October sees iOS with a very healthy 61.5% share, but just a month later that dips to 54.04% and another month later it's down again at 52.1%. Android didn't loose quite as much, but nevertheless it still lost more than 2 percentage points in the last two months of 2011. That contrasts nicely with Symbian, which saw an increase of more than 2 percentage points over the same time period. BlackBerry too nudged upwards, by around a percentage point, but a gain is a gain.

Before too much is read into these trends it is important to note the total share for each platform. Despite their gains neither BlackBerry nor Symbian is much more than a bit player in these results. Android still has a healthy share although it is in third place after Jave ME (no doubt a result of the ubiquity of cheap Java enabled handsets). For its part iOS is still well out in front with more than half the usage.

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Rupert Murdoch Takes To Twitter    [ 02-01-2012 19:28 ]

Author: Oleg Kononosov   Source: Twitter     Translation by: Paul Smith     

I don't follow many celebrities on Twitter and I certainly wouldn't think of writing about another famous face joining everyone's favourite 140 character means of communication. However, Rupert Murdoch is hardly your usual celebrity Tweeter. For one thing he's in his 80s; hardly Twitter's most common demographic. That's not really the main issue though, rather Murdoch just so happens to control the world's largest media empire and is a deeply polarising figure for many. Some consider him to be a brilliant businessman whilst others liken him to an evil tyrant trying to influence elections and control what they think. Whatever your take it's certainly going to be interesting watching him tweet ...

... and tweet away is just what he's doing. I must admit to being a little surprised by his style; I assumed that it would be a mixture of corporate speak and right-wing politicking, but no, quite the contrary. In fact he has so far come across as pretty much a normal user, tweeting about things as diverse as his opinion of the Steve Jobs biography ("interesting, but unfair") to the childrens' film I Bought A Zoo (he "LOVES" it). So far he has amassed around 45,000 followers, which isn't bad for just 3 days, but he is only following 4 people at the moment, one of which, interestingly enough, is a spoof Larry Paige account.

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