Stall The Ball

Just finished reading an article on CNN entitled “Ohmigod, teens are so over e-mail!”. Well advanced into my thirties (we won't mention the “F” word) and being an IT savvy type of person I used to consider myself fairly ahead of the curve when it came to electronic communications. But the one area I never got to grips with was texting.

Let me state I don’t like texting (in a bah humbug kind of way). Maybe it’s the size of the keys versus my sausage like fingers, maybe it’s the arthritis starting to creep in but spending up to a minute laboriously composing a reply to a text that would take 3 seconds in speech and maybe 5 in IM just gets my goat.

It probably doesn’t help that my mobile tariff means I can make as many calls as I want a month without really bothering about costs. Conversely all text messages I send cost me money.

Follow up:

And then there is the whole text speak stuff. I’m not averse to shorthand to speed up communications, in IM, emails and online forums shorthand such as LOL, TBH, FYI etc all help and are easily understood (by me at least). But this “U R gr8 “ or "WUF" does my head in.

But it seems it wasn’t a case of being behind the times but being so far ahead that these youngsters are only catching up now! Hah! According to CNN teenagers are only now dropping mail for things like IM. And they are even catching on to IM via mobile.

Radicati Group, an analysis company, expects IM use worldwide to reach 46.5 billion messages a day by 2009. There are no estimates on how many of those will be delivered to cell phones instead of computers, but analysts expect mobile IM usage to grow rapidly

The downside to this is that they are starting to catch up. Time to discover the next communications idea and jump on the bandwagon before these whipper snappers claim it for themselves.