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.

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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)

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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?

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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