Instant messaging crowding out SMS among the young

Text messaging is now passé as teenagers are increasingly using other forms of electronic communication like instant messaging and social networking services.

A youth consulting firm has said that this trend will see text volumes drop by 20 per cent in the next two years in regions including the UK, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil.

The fact that instant messaging services are cheaper than SMS and the rise in social networking is working in their favour.

''We've seen SMS usage fall among young people and the main driver is BlackBerry,'' said Graham Brown, director at Mobile Youth to Financial Times.

In fact, young users between the ages of 16 and 24 are using Blackberry instead of iPhone or other smartphones because of the free BBM messenger. Adoption by teenagers has also been the main reason behind the six-fold sales increase for BlackBerry in the past year.

Currently, 39 million people use the BBM, according to Research in Motion, which manufactures BlackBerry. In India, it has over 1 million BlackBerry subscribers.

Richard Windsor, mobile analyst at Nomura, has predicted that instant messaging clients could hit SMS, although he has not seen any impact yet. ''Once it starts to decline, I think it could continue to decline until it hits zero.''
 
Growth in the use of social networking services such as Facebook on mobile has also dented text messaging. Facebook and other social networking applications nowadays come bundled with all smartphones as a standard feature. These services though need a data plan.

Experts say the continuation of the same trend into adulthood could result in disappearance of text messaging within the next generation.