Slashdot Mirror
The Balkanization of Chatting
JThaddeus writes "Slashdot's own (or former) CmdrTaco has a posting on the Washington Post's website where he discusses how chat apps have overtaken SMS. Yeah, they are cheap. There's no telecom fee per message or for some number of messages per month. However 'The problem of course is that these systems are annoyingly incompatible with each other. My phone can buzz with chat notifications from 3 different apps at any moment. My desktop has even more scattered across browser tabs and standalone apps.' Ditto, nor do I want to hassle learning some app or trying to understand its who's-listening settings. I'll stick to email and to occasional SMS."
IRC still loves you.
....fascinating. (arches eyebrow)
Back in the pre-SMS days, http://www.trillian.im/ Trillian did this nicely. You would think there would be an app to combine all as well. Couldn't be that hard if it's been done once before.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
Standards
Back in the day, there was *one* discussion forum: Usenet. It was everywhere, and all servers connected to it. Now, there are *thousands* of disconnected forums, dozens of "forum software packages", etcetera. Even systems that try to connect distinct forums (Disqus) aren't necessarily the most popular option.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
considering that every carrier here has unlimited minutes/SMS plans by default
>> how chat apps have overtaken SMS. Yeah, they are cheap.
Chat apps are cheap? I thought they were all free.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
You still have to pay for data, which is far cheaper than the thousands of bucks per GB cost of an SMS
>> how chat apps have overtaken SMS. Yeah, they are cheap.
Chat apps are cheap? I thought they were all free.
WhatsApp (the most popular one) is not free...
FTA:
No single app wraps them conveniently together.
Uhm, apparently he's in the dark about a key feature of the new BlackBerry OS: BlackBerry Hub API
I love having one place where all of my message sources are aggregated, sorted and accessible, and it directly addresses the issue he's raising. If he was fully cognizant of the industry, Hub would've at least warranted mention...
-AC
Jabber, ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Chat, IRC, entire websites devoted to nothing but realtime chat... did I see more of a problem back in the 90's than there actually was and now it really is a soul-destroying issue in 2013? Or is this just rehashing 15-year-old+ news?
Using a chat app to bypass the charges for SMS makes sense, especially when you consider the usury rates that the mobile carriers charge.
The downside of course is you lose the biggest advantage of SMS, near universal compatibility for text and multimedia messaging.
But, it is the app vendors that are really at fault for the incompatibility issues. They each seem to feel that they will rule the world and therefore, it's fine for them to use their proprietary protocol and system. While there are several protocols/standards available, if the simply settled on the excellent and free Jabber/XMPP protocol they could have a (multimedia)messaging app that is widely compatible with existing services and future services. Several major providers, including Google already support the XMPP protocol.
But, app vendors aren't interested in compatibility, they all want their own walled garden with the mistaken assumption that theirs alone will be a runaway success. Which brings us to our present situation.
Now, you the user can change all that. You could buy an unlimited SMS plan. Or you could use only messaging apps that support XMPP. But, if you choose to keep hopping from one proprietary platform to another, Facebook, Twitter, Vines, whatever-today's-fad-is, then you will suffer the limited reach of your incompatible messaging app.
Enjoy.
Just use pidgin. One app to rule them all...
Bandwidth isn't free. Chat apps use bandwidth.
For sending text messages. Do you want to have ads? Do you want your chats monitored and your data sold? Do you want to pay a monthly, weekly per message fee for your messages that you send? A government who will offer the service for free, you pay for it in taxes.
For standard SMS text messages they get somehow added to your phone bill, I personally think they should be a LOT CHEAPER. But you do get a common protocol, because everyone else is doing it.
The other texting methods are incompatible with each other because they all have different rules on how they are funded and supported. The monetary gain must be related to the volume of the texting.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm not sure you actually know what usenet is, and you either never use it or you forgot how it works (note the present tense.) There are moderated and unmoderated groups. The Linux Kernel Mailing List, which is used in the development of the Linux Kernel, is one example of a still thriving newsgroup.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
DHS, FBI, CIA etc
Good to know and hear - I have not used it for years because it became useless pre-moderated, and my current ISP (who I've been with for 10+ years) doesn't carry newsgroups. Glad to know that it's at least in part working well.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
I can't stress enough how much it drives me up the wall to get text messages on my Android phone from iPhones. Far too often, they show as "multimedia" messages requiring a data connection just to download 5-7 words of text.
Or when an iPhone user sends a txt message to several people, and each "reply to all" response appears as a separate, disjoint SMS thread without the full conversation or context.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Blackberry? I think I remember them. Somehow managed to turn a leading position in business mobile comms into the position of once-great also-ran, and consigned themselves to the dustbin of history.
I know well enough what Usenet is. Hell, I AM the moderator in chile.grupos.anuncios (a local equivalent to news.announce.newgroups).
But to say Usenet is *far* from its glory days is a terrible understatement. Usenet is, for its glory days purposes, pretty much dead. Not many servers remain, not many users remain, entire hierarchies are dead. BESIDES some specific still-running newsgroups, not much activity remains.
Those isolated pockets of still healthy Usenet traffic are now no different than just any other web forum.
Usenet WAS the go-to place for online discussion. As much as it pains me, that ceased to be the case.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
seems we went from working together to make life better for everyone to individuals with great ideas to patent them, or handed them out free and turn them in a for pay model later... its sad
i currently use imo i don't particularly care for it but it seems to be the best free chat app for android that i have tried the rest seemed to be a constant stream of crap or facebook only. I really wish pidgin would release a android app.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
There are plenty of free newsgroup servers. Google is your friend! ... or at least their search engine is anyway ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I've been using Google Voice for texting and call forwarding for several months now, and it is flawless except for not yet working with email-to-SMS (which has only caused a problem twice so far, with a workaround available in both instances).
The associated Android app works nicely, making this a no-brainer for me. It's also wonderful to be able to type a text on a full-sized keyboard while using the Google Voice site.
No?
A whole article on this topic without mentioning maybe one of the more historically successful attempts at pulling together voice, chat, offline chat/mail - Skype?
I know it's not perfect but it is definitely the only messenging service that my family all work with - grandma/grandpa from their ancient Dell computers included.
Yes, but Chat apps are priced closer to the way that the water coming out of your garden hose is. As opposed to SMS, which is priced like bottled water.
ACs posting Pedantic flaws in my metaphore in 3...2...1...
What a chat app needs to do is to build up a network effect - get enough people using it such that a typical person who *doesn't* use it realises that a significant percentage of people he knows *are* using the app. Once that happens, he has a strong incentive to use the app, especially if it doesn't require him buying a new phone. But the other limiting factor to the adoption of chat apps over SMS is that not all phones are internet enabled.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
It's not suitable for most, because If you are not always connected someone can steal your nick and what you know someone is chatting too friendly things with someone else.
Infinite bucks per GB? SMS messages don't use bandwidth or data. They get carried in what is otherwise wasted padding in heartbeat packets. That's why they have a limited character length.
To be fair, there's not a lot of shame in that. Look at most market leading companies over the last 50 years. Many innovative companies fit that description. Kodak? Sony? Maybe Apple in 5 years... It doesn't mean they're bad, it just means its hard to be #1 forever. We can learn a lot from that.
:-)
Oh, and also really it's best if you have just one person run a company. Learn that too.
Apparently RIM caught on to this idea well before Taco since they've already built and added the feature that he's begging for as an integral component of the BlackBerry 10 Operating System (and it works VERY well!!) -> BlackBerry Hub API.
-AC
Most of my friends have iphones and have icloud or imessage or iwhatever its icalled ... I can send free texts to them and it doesn't cost me to get texts from them... I borrowed a Nexus4 from a friend for a few weeks and I much prefer it except for the $0.20/text message I have to pay my provider or pay them an extra $7.00/month for "unlimited text messaging"....
There's no way I will convince them to all install gropeme or some equivalent free texting app.. It just isn't going to happen.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
Spam filters for Usenet seems like a much more difficult problem to me than spam filters for Email. This is a medium with no functional delete function network-wide. If your message makes it in, it is basically there and not going anywhere. The only way is for each server to filter the incoming data, in real time (or close to it) and decide what is Spam and what is not. If a message is rejected, the spammer can easilly know about it, because they can easilly check the group and see that their message isn't there! Then they can modify the Spam and keep retrying until it makes it past the filters.
Compare this to email, where we have all sorts of various tricks to trap the email after it is flagged as Spam. It can be quarrantined, dropped silently, etc. The Spammer (should) not know if they beat the filter or not, since there is no confirmation and no way for them to see mailbox contents to confirm that the message is there. Filters remain effective a lot longer, so filtering is useful.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
They aren't quite dead yet but their pulse is getting pretty weak.
Infinite bucks per GB? SMS messages don't use bandwidth or data. They get carried in what is otherwise wasted padding in heartbeat packets. That's why they have a limited character length.
Yes, but that doesn't stop AT&T from charging me 20 cents per message. Considering each message only has 120 characters, it would cost me ridiculous amounts of money to send a GB-worth of data via SMS.
Personally I do all my chatting on my phone or tablet.
I have one app (beejive, in this case) which handles basically everything. yahoo, msn (dunno if that's relevant after the skype buyout.. I don't use it any more), gtalk, aim, facebook, etc.
The only other thing is iMessage.. which, frankly, is where I do the majority of my talking.
On my desktop I used to use Adium which, similar to beejive, handled everything I needed. Haven't used that in years though.
Email today is totally fine for texting. The problem is not the protocol, the problem are the clients that still fully stick to an emulation of writing something like a letter. Better email clients that support some ways of quickly composing and reading short blurbs of text could solve this easily.
(Of course this doesn't change the fact that many people want to have things like chatting or texting and email nicely separated.)
It keeps the riff-raff away.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The reason I use SMS and hope to use for a LONG time are the following:
1) No data plan needed. This means I am not tempted to go online all the time. So I just used a pre-payed card. Last top-up was 28/02 for 25 EUR. Still 15 EUR available
2) I can use it with the many people who do not have a smart phone. It just works.
3) Smart messaging. This means if I want to chit-chat, I SMS them where we can meet, we meet, have a few drinks and have an actual personal relationship.
4) Because it costs the other person to send something back, they don't send useless messages and most of the time just a message where we can meet.
And if smsing is not an option, you could, you know, use the device to, well telephone the other person and speak to them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I see the upside of SMS'es costing the sender money: it throttles the rate of incoming messages. I fear the day that the spammers figure out how to use Whatsapp for massive spam runs.
Too bad that here in Netherlands the telcos are moving to unlimited-SMS plans due to competition with Whatsapp...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Infinite bucks per GB? SMS messages don't use bandwidth or data. They get carried in what is otherwise wasted padding in heartbeat packets. That's why they have a limited character length.
Yes, but that doesn't stop AT&T from charging me 20 cents per message. Considering each message only has 120 characters, it would cost me ridiculous amounts of money to send a GB-worth of data via SMS.
A couple years ago I saw an amusing and pretty simple analysis showing that the end user bandwidth costs in terms of $/MB are far, far higher for SMS than for the Voyager space probes, including the cost of development and launch of said probes.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Seriously? Why do you have 3 on your phone? I'm betting you spend more time screwing with apps than your time is worth if you just paid for SMS.
I have ONE chat app on my PC, none on my phone, yet everyone seems to 'chat' just fine, if you think phones are meant for 'chatting'. A Jabber client is all you need, if you want to talk to someone who doesn't use a proper XMPP system, make them get on Google talk.
The problem is that you're trying too hard to talk to people that don't seem to be willing to do the same.
Don't 'chat' with people who don't use a proper 'chat' system. Sorry if that cuts out Facebook, but not playing Facebook's game is the only way you end their bullying chat on our system only bullshit. Meet the new boss, same as the old.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
www.pidgin.im handles pretty much every chat protocol that I know of other than Skype (which is just a stand alone app, and not a protocol), actually...(teamspeak/vent) are protocols/apps too, but aren't handled by pidgin, but those are voice mainly... so that is differently...
But everything from Facebook chat to the new site coming out for http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/ is using XMPP as the basis underlying chat protocol, then adding their own UI ontop of that. Perhaps we should look into better support of basis standards such as XMPP in our services.
I use IRC Daily still, and it works well for leaving it open in a few select channels where you want possibly constant update on the topics it covers.
It works fine for me across devices, stays in sync, gets archived to my gmail, it's xmpp...
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Now that Phones are more prevalent, and unlimited txt as well, I haven't used IRC, IM, AIM, Google Talk, Jabber, etc etc etc in several years now. Everything is done via SMS. Maybe it's just who my friends are, mostly outside the tech industry.
If only there was a Protocol to Simply Transfer Messages.
From my perspective the biggest problem with chat is the requirement for a chat server. As long as everybody depends on some intermediary that intermediary has incentive to "wall in" users for monetization or just "customer acquisition." There are all kinds of other problems with centralized chat like the ability to keep records of who is talking to who. Even if the content of the messages is encrypted, the flow of messages is not.
I think there a couple of obscure setups like bitchat and bitmessage that seem to address those issues, but clients are not widely available.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Navel-gaze much?
"ooh look at me I'm so dotcom and trendy and chat on the Internet! ooh!"
Try working.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
A bunch of the "chat" applications out there now are just jabber. You should be able to use any generic jabber client you want if you know the right settings to login.
...is the only thing I miss from 2007 era smartphones.
You still have to pay for data, which is far cheaper than the thousands of bucks per GB cost of an SMS
I don't pay anything for SMS, all the plans from my Carrier include unlimited SMS. Data, however, is extra if you want it, and is not unlimited use either.
Three years ago, this wasn't the case, but I'm not aware of any major Carrier who charges for SMS anymore.
I think this is just one part of a larger problem, which is that our communications are all fragmented.
Personally, I have 4 different email addresses that I actively use, as well as several that I don't use. I have 4 different IM accounts/protocols that I actively use. I have my cell phone, my work phone, and a Google Voice number, and voicemail for each. I have SMS via Google Voice and my phone directly, and then I also have iMessage on my phone, which arguably counts as a 5th IM account rather than SMS. I have membership and various forums and social networks. Through some of those social networks, I have even more email addresses and IM accounts. There may be even more accounts that I'm not thinking of.
So beyond the issue of SMS/chat, in that we have all these different incompatible and slightly different communications which don't work well together, and there isn't really a larger scheme to make it all coherent. I think Google may be the only company that's really trying to tackle the issue. They have been relatively successful in incorporating video, audio, and text chat with social networking. All that is tied in with Gmail and Google Voice under the same account, even though they're not really integrated yet. It'd be great if they could open APIs and protocols that allowed full interoperability with other services, e.g. if your friend could have Google+ and you have a Facebook account and a third friend sets up his own server, they can all still talk to each other and post on each others' walls.
But beyond that, I think we should be asking questions like: what's the difference between a IM message and SMS? Should you IM status be the same as a tweet? Where do you draw the line between a short blog post and a long Facebook status? What's the difference between sending an email and sending a IM to someone who is offline?
I would not only ask whether we need all these incompatible protocols, but whether we need all these different *kinds* of messages. Let's figure out which ones we really need, and then formulate standard protocols for distributing them.
Back in the day, there was *one* discussion forum: Usenet.
Ah, yes, I remember those days.
I was posting on multiple BBSes and occasionally using FIDOnet.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
No, it didn't. Spam was a big issue for a while but server side spam filters like cleanfeed and distributed systems like nocem became very sophisticated and effective. Unlike email filters, Usenet filters have the advantage in being able to see *all* the destinations. If an article that appeared in more than a handful of groups was quickly squashed. Spam never entirely went away but it well under control long before the decline of Usenet.
There were also efforts like Usenet2 that created a network of trusted servers who would keep spam out. It worked fairly well but interest waned initially because the spam problem was effectively controlled in regular Usenet but even more so as total volume declined and the Usenet2 corner became too thinly populated to be of much use.
Now there is still the problem of idiots posting things in inappropriate places but that's a problem of moderation, something Usenet never did well. (Usenet *did* have moderated groups but it drastically slowed conversation and did not scale well)
I still run a small news server. Spam is only a "problem" is groups where the posting volume has dropped near zero and spam is all that is left. A bigger problem is that I keep losing peers as people give up and shutdown thier servers.
Could have had our cake and eaten it too if Wave had taken off. This is what it was REALLY for, but noone seemed to get it and Google sucks at PR.
Imagine visiting your wave inbox, which is connected to the forum waves that you subscribed to, and seeing the wave chats you were participating in on facebook.
Alas, "easy" often triumphs over "best".
I hoped for a moment that chat applications are finally getting Romany localization.
Anyway, that's similar to what happened to usenet.
AccountKiller
Much like MSN messenger did to AIM and ICQ, the default seems to be going to Facebook messenger. Simple and ubiquitous and usually covers all your friends as they usually have facebook too.
Through mobile they're trying to take the voice/video from skype and might pull it off.
Just through sheer numbers facebook will own the chat world just like msn did
Did I write it? http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909998&cid=34546562
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Google talk is the perfect example of how the beancounters will stick to certain principles even if they are shooting themselves in the foot twice a day. Lock all your users in! People who want to talk to them will also have to get a Google account! The basics of chatting was done in the late cretacious. The ONLY way any chat service can beat the competition is by opening up to other servers. If google, skype and whatsapp users could chat with each other, they would kick Facebook in the nuts, HARD. Even just opening up to corporate Sharepoint servers would give serious extra traffic, with all the American CIOs who shit their pants at the idea of corporate data not residing on their own servers.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
their pulse is getting pretty weak
Really? -- they have BILLIONS of dollars in the bank, over 80 million CURRENT users, and they are GROWING.
In fact, the only measure by which they might appear to be "getting ... weak" is by overall percentage of the market, solely because they're not growing as fast as the market, at the present time.
Given that they basically had to take a 2-year hiatus to overcome the missteps of prior management, this state of affairs isn't surprising. Nevertheless, despite it being an unpopular truth, BlackBerry (nee RIM) is once again a GROWING organization. At present, the biggest hurdles they face are:
1: overcoming a market perception that is based solely on fanboism and "truthiness" and the desire to write incendiary articles that will generate page-views
and 2: Market forces that seek to generate profit from their misfortune/demise (i.e. short-sellers, and competitors with eyes on both their IP and their other still-valuable infrastructure technologies).
-AC
technically, LKML is a mailing list that happens to be mirrored to one or more newsgroups
Placing negative connotations on slavic/balkan cultures (e.g. 'slovenly' and 'balkanization') is a form of *discrimination*. Disgusting practice and it really ticks me off.
textplus and textme are both free, both use your data plan, and both give you a separate real phone number so that your friends just see regular SMS messages--though coming from a different number than your "real" number.
Yes, parts of it are around. The parts I stuck with even into this millenia have devolved too much. One actual post per month, with 10 spam messages a day.
But the GP was right, it was one place to go for all forums. You didn't have a separate location and method for each topic, you didn't have multiple competing forums types for one topic, etc. You were never required to register for it and sign in first. Pick your own interface not that chosen for you by the web site administrator. There's been no suitable replacement for it.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Usenet's death is not greatly exaggerated. Just because a few people still use it doesn't mean it has much relevancy in the modern Internet. Outside of your one kernel mail list example (a mailing list is not a usenet newsgroup.. do they use a news-to-mail gateway?) I haven't heard anyone mention Usenet's use outside of piracy, that is, as a dumping ground for binaries that is off media lawyers' radar since they're focused on web sites and bittorrent. I used to use it all the time -- it was email and newsgroups (archie was pretty useless by the time I started using the 'net, and the web hadn't really been developed yet). But long gone are the days when a majority of Internet users used it, long gone are the days when your ISP would provide an NNTP server for you to use.
Most people use website-specific forums now which SUCK compared to what you had on Usenet 20 years ago. Instead of rec.sports.*, most people comment on espn.com or some other sports-related web portal.
Hell, Slashdot is a replacement for Usenet. At least its discussion tools are better than most.
It was invented in the 1800's. It's called a phone.
As much as I hate to say this, Facebook is really the only service that offers "everything." First of all, you can message anyone on Facebook by their name, so now you've eliminated the need for addresses/screen names. Facebook messages can be long like e-mails, and conversations can span weeks or days, or they can be short like instant messages and carry on in real time. Facebook messages can include multiple recipients like e-mail conversation, or in the same way it can be like a chat room. You can access it through the web, mobile apps with push notification, or desktop software. It automatically syncs the inbox/history across all platforms; you basically never miss a message. You can attach files, embed photos, and so on. The only thing that e-mail does better is lets you have multiple conversations going on simultaneously with the same person, categorized by subject (they could probably implement this with some sort of conversation forking option).
Various services offer all these things in slightly different ways, but never wit the same level of accessibility and unification. Google tried to step into Facebook's territory and ended up with 3 distinct messaging services: Gmail, Talk, and G+ Messenger (mobile). On top of that you can "inbox" people on G+ by sharing posts with notifications. The integration between Gmail, Talk, and Android can give you a sort of omni-chat experience, but it simply lacks the cohesion and ease of Facebook.
As for Skype, it is coming close to offering what Facebook offers in terms of chat features, but a) their mobile app needs to be more "mobile", and b) they need a good web interface.
They'll keep trying, either way.
Is it made with whole milk? What's the fat content?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
but he is dead to us.
the editing of this site went to hell long before he left, too.
Japan dumped SMS long ago and went straight to email. I have no love for SMS and 140 character limits
On top of that I like the features of some of the chat clients. I like "Line" for instance which is so popular in Japan that you basically can't connect to friends without it. Like it's "stickers". They let me express things that aren't expressed as well through text or text figures.
Thinking that we should all stick to SMS seems akin to be like saying we should have all stuck to FAX or said with horses and buggies instead of cars. I'm happy to use the stuff. I'm not going to be suck with your SMS 140 chars or you IRC text only 1970s tech thank you.
I have owned a N900 for many a year and it integrates all chat, sms, video etc with each other. If someone calls me whether via google voice, skype or via phone it is exactly the same. All messages coming from google chat, sms etc are unified into a single "conversation".
It continues to amaze me that what to me is "standard functionality" seems to be lacking on all other phones. I hope my N900 never dies.
The first one I checked is still active. I'm not about to waste my time doing an exhaustive search. The fact that you use sports as an example tells me you aren't actually concerned with using newsgroups for anything important. It may well be true that the useless newsgroups have gone out of style. The ones that matter seem to still be around. As far as LKML being a mailing list I agree that it is in the name (ML) but it is also a newsgroup. If it can be accessed via NNTP it qualifies as a newsgroup, just as a website that can also be accessed via ftp is also an ftp site.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Almost all of the dev channels are pretty good for intelligent discussion, although you'll also see a lot of personal discussion going on in them since it's also mostly the same people day in and day out.
Uhh... as someone from the Balkans, I find this mildly offensive. But whatever.
I stopped using MSN/AIM/ICQ ages ago. Now it's FB chat (most of my friends), whatsapp (friends with android) and bbm (friends with blackberries). I use all three from the same device and it doesn't bother me.
SMS isn't going away any time soon. Some of the stuff rob malda says really blows my mind. He's such an idiot.
Tap water is not safe for human consumption without filtering/boiling in many parts of the world. Are you implying than SMS is somehow safer and won't give you Montezuma's Revenge?