Mobile messaging vendor Syniverse today touted strong growth for the carrier messaging services it supports, noting that it helped deliver an average of 1.52 billion messages per day in Q1 2010, up 32% from the year before. While SMS accounts for 98% of its peer-to-peer messaging volume, it did see 235% growth in MMS messaging year over year.
Said Syniverse CEO Tony Holcombe:
MMS, which was initially slow to catch on with subscribers, is now making up for lost time. Syniverse, the leading provider of MMS services in North America, saw 235 percent growth for this messaging format from first quarter 2009 to first quarter 2010 as more individuals turn to their mobile phones to serve as their primary camera and video recording devices.
Holcombe said that in addition to more mobile devices and improved messaging experiences, Syniverse benefits from the exponential worldwide growth of popular community-based services, such as social networking and mobile giving, and new market entrants – cable operators, application developers and Internet companies – that need a bridge between them and those in the traditional mobile space.
“When someone updates his or her status on a social networking site via a mobile device, uses a text message to pledge to a charitable organization or sends a family photo from a mobile phone, an MMS or SMS must move across the global mobile network,” Holcombe said. “The result of this ongoing growth in mobile connections among friends, family and organizations has resulted in a stable growth platform for all of us in the mobile messaging space.”
Connected Planet’s take,
Rich Karpinski:
The link between telecom messaging — like SMS and MMS — and more Web-based social media messaging is very notable. Many expected mobile Web-based mobile messaging or Web services like Twitter or Facebook to hurt SMS volumes and revenues, but in reality the reverse has happened. Twitter’s Biz Stone has been very vocal in touting SMS as a universal baseline service that supports, rather than competes with, Twitter.
It looks like a similar trend is happening with image and video posting, with MMS becoming an important conduit to social networks like Facebook. That trend actually ties together advances in mobile devices to users’ seemingly endless thirst to share content via the Web and social networks — with telecom services like MMS serving as the glue between the two worlds. While many mobile apps support mobile sharing, leveraging SMS and MMS is just easier in some cases.
Yet another reason why SMS wins.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below: