Texting has to be the biggest form of message sharing that we have today and the wireless carriers are laughing all the way to the bank with every one that is sent.

First some basic facts about SMS texting and its cost courtesy of a great post by Knowlton Thomas at TechVibes.

Let’s suppose you text your friend the following: “Yo Joe, what’s up bud?”. Well it turns out that a short message like that ends up costing the carrier 1/1,000 of a cent. So if you send out anywhere around a 1,000 messages it might end up costing the carrier one single penny and for those of you that are message crazy, well, you might cost the carrier two cents.

But here’s the thing, most carrier have a package deal for your monthly texting costs that get charged to your bill and most of them are around the $5 mark so in effect the carrier is making $4.98 profit each and every month from every single subscriber who has a texting plan.

Then there are those that have pay-as-you-go plan, and this is where it gets insane because in most cases those people are paying 20¢ per message which means the carrier is making 0.19.999¢ profit on each message.

Now to add insult to injusry – it seems that most times these messages actually don’t cost the carrier anything.

But as if this isn’t ridiculous enough already, there’s icing on the cake: SMS are piggybacked onto cellular networks. This means that text messages occupy, as William puts it, “otherwise unused space in a control channel used for network maintenance.” So texting, most of the time, doesn’t even cost your wireless carrier that fraction of a penny. It costs them, quit literally, nothing.

via TechVibes

And the carriers wonder why their customers hate them.

Ever wondered how badly you’re getting screwed by your carrier over SMS, because you are. is a post from: The Inquisitr

iPhone just added one more thing it’s capable of doing when it’s busy dropping phone calls- FarmVille for iPhone is slowly making its way across the world.

Chris first mentioned Zynga’s forays into mobile FarmVille gaming in April, saying:

Taking a break from wallpapering its offices with hundred dollar bills, Zynga basically confirmed to Joystiq that FarmVille was being developed for portable devices, stating: “Zynga plans to expand to various mobile platforms, but unfortunately, we cannot provide additional information at this time.”

FarmVille for iPhone was officially announced at WWDC earlier this month. Mashable reports that the app is already available in New Zealand, and users have spotted it in Australia, too. FarmVille for iPhone comes at a good time for Zynga, as the game dipped slightly in popularity last month.

Do you plan on downloading the ubiquitous FarmVille to your iPhone or iPod touch? Do you hate the site of it or are you kind of hooked? Ever get in trouble over your FarmVille addiction?

FarmVille for iPhone infecting devices everywhere is a post from: The Inquisitr

Or like this dude, you might have to go to church.

[Failbook]

Always practice safe sexts… is a post from: The Inquisitr

It looks like FarmVille might soon be extending its tentacles beyond Facebook, and will soon appear on your iPhone, iPad, Android, or as a … SMS game? However the hell that works.

In what can only be described as a tremendous piece of internet sleuthing, the Sherlockian Superannuation discovered a bunch of domain registrations for the following:

- Farmvilleandroid.com
- Farmvilleipad.com
- Farmvilleiphone.com
- Farmvillesms.com

And who are these registered to? That’s right, kids: Zynga, makers of FarmVille, and our impossibly rich future overlords for the years 2017 – 3245.

The idea of a SMS-based FarmVille baffles me, but whatever keeps that nonsense away from my Facebook news feed is good with me.

Taking a break from wallpapering its offices with hundred dollar bills, Zynga basically confirmed to Joystiq that FarmVille was being developed for portable devices, stating: “Zynga plans to expand to various mobile platforms, but unfortunately, we cannot provide additional information at this time.”

See also: Bulgarian politician fired over FarmVille addiction

[Superannuation, via Joystiq]

FarmVille heading to your mobile device of choice is a post from: The Inquisitr

In the semi-annual CTIA Wireless Industry Survey there were a lot of interesting facts and figures but of them all it has to be the fact that some 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the United States alone. This works out to 4.1 billion daily SMS messages winging their way around the US each and every day.

Of course this is bringing about the old “running out of spectrum” bugaboo from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski who said at the CTIA wireless industry convention on Wednesday in San Diego:

“We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month. So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks? The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum The biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis.”

Source:  Digital Daily – OMFG: 4.1 Billion Text Messages Sent Every Day in US

With those kind of figures it is only a matter of time until psychologists start lining up their next BMW’s as texting is declared a disorder of some sort.

4.1 Billion text messages sent every day in the US is a post from: The Inquisitr

In case you didn’t see the original story, word leaked last week that Gmail Labs would be adding an SMS chat option. It’ll let you send a text message to any U.S. mobile phone through Gmail’s Web-based chat interface. All of your texts will come from a specific and constant 406 area code, so people can text back to you and their messages will show up in your chat window — just like a normal IM-style conversation.

Google Product Manager Leo Dirac now reveals, however, that his team came across an unexpected problem in the final moments of testing. “We found a glitch,” he says. “When you’d try to turn it on, it wouldn’t fully enable. We thought about keeping it out there — bugs and all — but the experience wasn’t that great.”

As a result, Dirac says, SMS chat has been put on hold until it can be fixed. He predicts we’ll see the feature appear within the next two weeks, though, so hopefully you won’t be holding your breath for long.

(Image: Webmonkey)

Gmail’s Free Texting — What Happened? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google may have killed its free “Send to Phone” online text messaging tool, but now it’s replacing it with an even easier SMS solution, according to published reports.

Gmail SMS chat is expected to debut today, tech blog Webmonkey reports. The service — as-of-yet unannounced on the official Gmail Blog — will let you send text messages to cell phones directly from Gmail’s chat interface, the blog says.

Once active, Webmonkey says the function will show up in the Labs menu within Gmail. (As of now, it’s not popping up in mine.) Supposedly, once it’s running, you can then just type in any mobile number, and your message will be delivered as a text. Webmonkey says the message will come from one of several thousands of reserved 406 area code numbers. The same number, it says, will remain constant with your account.

If the service works as touted, this actually sounds pretty handy. The description indicates that the mobile user will be able to text back to you, and their message will pop up in your Gmail chat window — just like any other normal chat message.

There are several other free Web-based texting tools around, but for those of us who have Gmail open often, this functionality will be a welcomed addition, both in the convenient placement and in the interactive back-and-forth chat ability already available in AOL’s Instant Messenger platform. Let’s hope it debuts as predicted — and doesn’t get beaten down by the climbing number of sneaky fees popping up in the text messaging world and costing companies extra for these sorts of services.

(Image: Webmonkey)

Update: Gmail’s Free Texting: What Happened?

Report: Gmail to Get Free Texting Today is a post from: The Inquisitr

“Send to Phone” had let you fire off unlimited texts to any U.S. mobile number through either a Web interface or a Firefox/IE toolbar. Google quietly retired it within the past few weeks, though, making no formal announcement outside of the notice on the page. A spokesperson was not immediately available Thursday to provide any further explanation as to the reason for its discontinuation.

Fear not, though: The era of free Internet-based text messaging is not over. I’ve had good luck with Gizmo SMS, a similarly simple Web-based SMS provider with no fees. Unlike Google’s former service, it even supports texts to a ton of countries outside the U.S. If that doesn’t meet your fancy, txtDrop.com is another comparable alternative, though only for users in the U.S. and Canada.

Google “Send to Phone” Gone — Where to Find Free Texting Now? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter pulled the plug on its outbound text messaging service for all of the UK last Thursday, saying the service was simply causing it to lose too much money. Needless to say, the decision drew plenty of negative reaction from users who came to rely on their text-based Tweets.

Now, though, two new companies have surfaced with hopes of filling the gap. TweetSMS first showed its face a few days ago, as profiled on Mashable. The soon-to-launch site promises to send individual, hourly, or daily SMS updates for “a very small fee.” TweetSMS’s site isn’t live yet but indicates it is coming “very soon.”

One step ahead, Australian-based TwitSMS made its debut over the weekend and is now fully functional. Founder Jeff Bonnes — a Twitter user himself — said he was annoyed at the discontinued SMS service and decided to take action, piecing his business together with his wife in a matter of days. TwitSMS is charging £0.07 per message for UK-based users. Australians will pay $0.11 AUD per text. The messages have to be purchased in advance packages of 100, 200, or 500.

In the meantime, BusinessWeek is predicting more changes ahead for Twitter users worldwide. The site has to find a way, it says, to start pulling in the dough. Its prediction? First banner ads, then possibly contextual ads within messages — and ultimately, BusinessWeek suspects, a full acquisition and integration into another existing service.

Services Springing Up to Replace Twitter SMS is a post from: The Inquisitr

The reason all comes down to cash, the service says. Twitter was evidently able to create cost-effective deals with mobile providers in the three countries mentioned above, but never in the UK. Right now, the company says it’s paying an average of $1,000 per user every year there, and that’s if each user sticks to 250 or less received messages a week.

“We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach,” the official memo reads.

The move is certainly leading to some renewed cries of “Twitter is dead!” But is it?

There are really three things that could come from this:

1. 1) Twitter suffers a significant user loss in the UK as people jump ship following the cutback.
2. 2) Twitter sees only a minimal difference, as the prevalence of smartphones enables many people to use the service on-the-go via a browser rather than via SMS.
3. 3) Twitter gets overwhelmed with negative response and decides to reinstate the service with a subscription fee of some sort.

It’s actually rather surprising that the company didn’t try #3 first. Will that end up being its alternative, and would people get on-board with the idea of a monthly SMS fee — similar perhaps to what mobile carriers charge for text use?

If we accept the fact that the free SMS service is gone, it seems like a combination of #2 with the option of #3 would be Twitter’s best bet to keep as much of its current UK-based userbase as possible.

A related note: Twitter has indicated that it’s working on negotiations to bring cost-effective SMS service to Australia. It’s also planning to add local service numbers to undisclosed “countries throughout Europe” in the coming weeks.

Twitter Kills UK’s SMS — Will That Kill Twitter? is a post from: The Inquisitr