Congrats 2 U: txting nears 20

TEXT messaging is about to leave its teenage years behind, turning 20 in December.

It has helped organise countless nights on the town, started and ended relationships, and been used to hire and fire.

Text messaging is still enormously popular. In April, 691 million text messages travelled across Vodafone New Zealand’s network alone, or about 250 a second.

While that number was up 20 per cent on a year before, the rate of growth has slowed.

Vodafone product manager Greg Mcalister said social media applications, Twitter, Facebook, and instant messaging were all providing substitutes.

Victoria University futurologist Ian Yeoman said, while text messaging might evolve with technological advances, it had already changed the way people interacted and was now ‘‘part of society’’.

That was not only because it was cheap and instant, but because it was an unintrusive form of communication that allowed people to feel more secure making contact with one another. Studies of romances in Britain suggested 40 per cent of those in Generation Y – born after 1985 – had been asked out by text message, he said.

Most studies found texting had neither ‘‘dumbed down’’ nor taken the emotion out of the way people communicate.

The first text message is believed to have been sent in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, used a personal computer to say ‘‘Merry Christmas’’ to a friend on Vodafone’s network in Britain.

Before that, people had to resort to sending messages such as ‘‘07734’’ via pager and standing on their heads, just to say ‘‘hello’’ to one another.

Text messaging was initially slow to catch on and didn’t arrive in New Zealand until 1999.

Vodafone offered it for free for six months.

Telecom upped the ante in 2004 when it launched its ‘‘$10 text’’ plan, which was credited with turning around its fortunes in the mobile market.