Submitted by Rob Hellstrom on Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:59

A research paper by Rob Hellstrom, Principal Consultant, Handvision

"Hope you will be able to stand the shock of receiving this P.C. in haste ET" (May 1906)

How long will SMS last? Will anything significantly different replace it? This article examines an old technology that is surprisingly similar to SMS. History does repeat.

Once upon a time, major service providers around the world introduced a short message service allowing people to send multiple messages to each other for a nominal fixed fee. Typically the message space was small, and as a result people invented methods to deal with this by cramming in as much information as possible using shorthand, acronyms and restricted grammar. It became very popular, creating upgrades to services infrastructure, and employing additional people, all despite the fact that people were already using the same service provider to communicate with each other using similar services. Sounds familiar?

So far this story could be about SMS, but in fact we are talking about the arrival of the humble postcard. The postcard was a major innovation of John P Charleton who patented the first private postcard in 1861 in Philadelphia, USA, and after 10 years it had been introduced in a number of countries around the world. Postcards became wildly popular in ways and for reasons that are strangely similar to SMS and MMS based services. In fact, the more you dig into postcard history the more you can see how postcard services had a very similar extended marketing mix to contemporary mobile phone messaging services.

Most people believe all products have a lifecycle and postcards haven't been immune from this. Studying history might help answer what is the lifecycle of SMS or MMS.

By the early 1900's postcards were enjoying a golden age of popularity. Around this time, the camera had been invented, mass picture printing had improved and all of this saw the introduction of picture postcards which only added to the popularity of postcards. The first "MMS" became available! More interestingly, cameras became cheap enough to allow people to begin manufacturing their own picture postcards creating the opportunity for people to send the equivalent of MMS messages, and the service providers enjoyed increased income from carrying these special postcards, which allowed for more complex multimedia messages to be sent. The "camera phone" had been invented.

Once the Kodak Box Brownie became available, everyone could afford a "camera phone". Based on material collected in Australia about postcard history, it is possible to learn even more about this interesting communications phenomenon, and draw conclusions for SMS and MMS. From books written on the subject and from multiple collections, "short messages" (with pictures) still exist so we can see what people were writing about.

Messages range from holiday, birthday and Christmas greetings to practical arrangements, romance, family news, sickness, health and description of travel and work. Unfortunately, postcards died out, being replaced by a number of other services, mostly because of the telephone, telegraph and telegram.

Why were postcards so popular?

Here are some reasons drawn from my research:

• Postcards offered the nearest thing to immediate communication prior to the introduction of the telephone, with up to 3 deliveries a day in some districts, implying that "SMS" as a concept was invented before the telephone. This was far better than normal mail, which promised only one delivery a day, and allowed people to be more spontaneous in arranging meetings.

Examples of authentic postcards show the "txt"-style vocabulary used by people:

• "Sorry will not take lesson tonight but will resume on the 20th next Yours truly Mrs Brown" (Mailed: March 1908);
• "Dear Jennie, Sorry I can't come out tonight (Monday) the other girl is going to visit. I am going to a class so it is just as well. Love from R.E.W." (Mailed: 1907);
• "We live where the X is on the card Bill, House has garden to water side Bob";
• "The Annual Meeting will be held at Brisbane House on 18th. Your attendance is requested. Hon Sec." (Mailed: 15th October, 1900);
• "Hope you will be able to stand the shock of receiving this P.C. in haste ET" (May 1906);
• "Dear Gracie, Just a PC to let you know I am still alive. Are you still labouring over invoices what a treat. I am having a glorious time and feeling much better. Yours sincerely, Iva." (March 1907).

• Coverage (i.e. submission & delivery areas) was the same as normal mail;

• Postcards cost only half the price of a letter. This put written communication within reach of a greater number of people, including younger demographics;

• Being prepaid, it offered a convenient transactional engagement model to support greater penetration of the market;

• Postcards offered a choice of styles, pictures, templates and liveries. Suddenly communicating was fun, compared to the formalised and stilted method of letter writing;

• Postcards were particularly popular with less literate classes because they were cheaper, there was no room nor need for the complexity of a letter which had a strong social etiquette, a formalised structure and was generally difficult to compose. So the language became less formal and highly abbreviated to fit onto the smaller space. Spelling and punctuation were not essential in the hasty notes.

• Picture postcards became cheap and convenient souvenirs for those who could afford holidays or travel before camera prices put cameras within the reach of most people;

• Colour picture postcards offered appeal in a time when most images were black and white, and they became highly popular to collect and swap;

• During the so-called "golden age", novelty postcards (unusual additions or processes designed to attract attention) were introduced. The most successful style had two thin layers sandwiching a number of elements. They included squeaking cards, rolling-glass eye cards, hold-to-light cards (containing transparent layers which when held to very strong light took on coloured tints - the B&W era), moving parts cards (which was typically a protruding paper lever sandwiched between two layers would move something in the picture), and simple concertina "view cards". True MMS postcards had arrived!

• Theatrical Postcards were postcards that became common in the early 1900's and used for advertising theatre plays, the key public entertainment at the time. The card would have a picture of the play or the leading actor on one side, and a welcome message on the other. "Bills" as they became known were delivered in letterboxes by groups of young kids. Real estate agents in Australia still advertise this way today, along with all the other junk mail. Whilst there was some limited SMS spamming in Australia, new legislation enforced opt-in only promotion of products and services, to which real estate agents comply today;

• Product and service companies started producing their own cards, sometimes with fairly nominal product or logo placement and went to elaborate lengths to ensure the card would be collected and placed in albums. This might have some bearing on mobile album services of today.

Analysis of a similar communication phenomenon - 125 years apart

From its introduction around 1869 and spreading around the world within 6 years, postcard services became incredibly popular in the then developed world because they offered a means of communication not otherwise available, certainly not at the price. In many ways, for its time, the service was quite advanced, providing train-situated postboxes for postcards, which allowed messages to be sent from a moving train, something we have only been able to do again in the last 15 years.

Thirty years later, in 1900, the picture postcard was introduced. The new postcard was just as easy to use and popular as the text-only postcard. Cameras became cheap enough to allow people to create their own picture postcards. Within 10-20 years of the launch of the camera, postcard use was beginning to wane. Eventually the phone displaced the text postcard as a more effective short - vocal -message communication mechanism, and it offered a number of other benefits over the postcard. However the telephone was still too expensive for most people, until it became commoditised, a process that took up to 40 years. The reason why postcards didn't remain useful might be explained by the fact that they could only be delivered up to 3 times a day, whereas a phone call could "deliver" messages at leisure and as many times a day as required.

In recent years, the Internet has created the fundamental, globally accepted platform for email and "instant messages" to be delivered, supplanting printed mail traffic worldwide. This became popular whilst even domestic phone calls were still considered expensive. This was however a service only accessible in particular places, e.g. with a PC at home or at work. Despite these conditions, Instant Messages have been to email what postcards were to handwritten letters, The global mobile phone network created an opportunity to write a short message or more lately, to send a picture from a tiny device which sits in the pocket. Pricing differences meant that it was cheaper to send a message than to call someone.

What will be popular in future?

It seems that given this history, text messaging has fulfilled a need over the last 125 years that has never been fully satisfied. SMS and MMS will have a lifecycle as well as what is commonly called Internet email in all its forms today, whereby continued spam might be a valid reason to get rid of the current system. New text message services continue to manifest themselves over new networks, however to be popular each successive new generation of messaging services has had to offer some additional benefits, even though they might seem quite minor to us today.

We are always looking for the Next Big Thing. Various operators and R&D organisations have looked at embedding devices in teeth or devices that read lips. Accessing thoughts directly has also been proposed as a means of emitting and receiving messages in future, though that sounds like it could be a bit of a shock to the system. It can be safely assumed that within the next 50 years, there will be another major new kind of messaging service - it will be built on this recurring interpersonal communication requirement - but with some interesting new benefits. Perhaps we will look back then and think how slow or cumbersome was an SMS or email message, and perhaps everyone in your personal "mental chat group" will join your sentimental recollection within milliseconds. It will be interesting to see how this new service works and how it resolves the extended marketing mix better than today's services, but I hope you will be able to "stand the shock" of receiving it when it arrives.