<P> Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world . SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan; see below), United States, Australia and New Zealand and is also gaining influence in Africa . Popularity has grown to a sufficient extent that the term texting (used as a verb meaning the act of mobile phone users sending short messages back and forth) has entered the common lexicon . Young Asians consider SMS as the most popular mobile phone application . Fifty percent of American teens send fifty text messages or more per day, making it their most frequent form of communication . In China, SMS is very popular and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001). It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines, where the average user sends 10--12 text messages a day . The Philippines alone sends on average over 1 billion text messages a day, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India . SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway / airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS . </P> <P> Texting became popular in the Philippines in 1998 . In 2001, text messaging played an important role in deposing former Philippine president Joseph Estrada . Similarly, in 2008, text messaging played a primary role in the implication of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in an SMS sex scandal . Short messages are particularly popular among young urbanites . In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap . For example, in Australia, a message typically costs between A $0.20 and $0.25 to send (some prepaid services charge $0.01 between their own phones), compared with a voice call, which costs somewhere between $0.40 and $2.00 per minute (commonly charged in half - minute blocks). The service is enormously profitable to the service providers . At a typical length of only 190 bytes (including protocol overhead), more than 350 of these messages per minute can be transmitted at the same data rate as a usual voice call (9 kbit / s). There are also free SMS services available, which are often sponsored and allow sending SMS from a PC connected to the internet . Mobile service providers in New Zealand, such as Vodafone and Telecom NZ, provide up to 2000 SMS messages for NZ $10 per month . Users on these plans send on average 1500 SMS messages every month . Text messaging has become so popular that advertising agencies and advertisers are now jumping into the text messaging business . Services that provide bulk text message sending are also becoming a popular way for clubs, associations, and advertisers to reach a group of opt - in subscribers quickly . </P> <P> Research suggests that Internet - based mobile messaging will have grown to equal the popularity of SMS in 2013, with nearly 10 trillion messages being sent through each technology . Services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Viber have led to a decline in the use of SMS in parts of the world . </P> <P> Of many texting trends, a system known as microblogging has surfaced, which consists of a miniaturized blog, inspired mainly by people's tendency to jot down informal thoughts and post them online . They consist of websites like Twitter and its Chinese equivalent Weibo (微 博). As of 2016, both of these websites were popular . </P>

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