

Don't Call Me, I Won't Call You - meghan
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20Cultural.html?_r=1&src=twr

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abalashov
This article certainly has interesting implications for those of us
hyperventilating about next-generation voice technologies. Being in the VoIP
engineering consulting business (and a fixed-line centric one, at that), it
does highlight an interesting point I usually ignore due to self-selecting
bias; I like talking on the phone, and tend to talk to a lot of other people
who do also. It's important for people like me to be reminded that overall,
voice minutes are declining as a proportion of electr(ic/onic) communication.

Also, text is a big deal. In the fixed-line VoIP world, we tend to
dismissively poo-poo SMS as a pre-IP anachronism that maintains its captive
user base at the whim of carriers who design handset interfaces that afford
vast UX preference to SMS over other means of delivering text messages, e.g.
the various iPhone "free text messaging replacement" apps that have popped up
that run over IP rather than the SMS portion of the mobile transport core. I
usually think its days are numbered, and think 160 characters is laughably
impractical in a world of mushrooming smartphone adoption. But the kinds of
sociological observations raised in this article make me wonder if that's
really true.

