The new report from UK analyst firm Informa says that almost 19 billion "over the top" chat messages were sent on messaging apps like Skype, WhatsApp, Kik and Viber in 2012.

But in that same period, just 17.6 billion SMS text messages were sent. Around this time next year, Informa predicts 50 billion text messages with OTT services, and 21 billion SMS messages. So, for something that's supposed to be in trouble, SMS will actually be growing in traffic next year.

This kind of deflates the celebratory tweet of Neelie Kroes, VP President of the EU Commission responsible for the EU's Digital Agenda program sent this morning.

It's official: chat apps have overtaken SMS globally. The cash cow is dying. Time for telcos to wake up & smell the data coffee.

— Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 29, 2013

Kroes' point about SMS being a cash cow is certainly valid - to a point. Text charges on some plans can be a huge revenue source for mobile carriers, to the point where many regulatory agencies and customers have complained.

Kroes logic is simple: if texting is migrating to over-the-Internet chat services, then SMS will cease to become less of a revenue source for mobile companies. Except for one problem: the data plans that will be required for the use of the smartphones and other devices that can use these apps can cost more than even unlimited texting plans.

That's certainly the case for my Verizon plan. To use a locked smartphone with a data plan, I have to pay an extra $39.99/month, compared to the feature phone my youngest daughter uses that has unlimited calls and texting.

I realize that mileage will vary, of course, but SMS plans are usually bundled with basic phone plans these days and it's the data plans that cost more. And you usually need a data plan to get a smartphone from a carrier and all of these apps have to run on a smartphone.

You could, or course, have a Wi-Fi only tablet or handheld device. This would be the best way to use these apps without paying for SMS or data plans… but you'll be tethered to public Wi-Fi clouds and unable to chat out in the big wide world.

Kroes' argument, then, seems short-sighted - while I am sure there will be some savings for people currently getting ripped off for their SMS use, any truly mobile device will have an expensive data plan attached to it. That will wipe out any potential savings and may even cost more.

Mobile carriers, I suspect, aren't worried about SMS at all.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On the surface, it sounds like little more than a blatant attempt to boost use of Facebook Message - the service's email, texting and instant messaging feature - but Chat Heads is actually of one of Home's most appealing and important features. Not only does it build-in an already viable alternative to the many messaging apps currently on the market, but it also manages to do for Facebook and Android what iMessage does for Apple and iOS. 

Chat Heads Offer Alternative To SMS

In other words, Chat Heads give Facebook a subtle way to nudge users away from SMS and towards its own platform - without seeming like the same evil overlord that changed all its members' default email address last summer.

This move finally establishes Facebook Message as a serious player in the field of SMS-killers, and the most disruptive one to date. Its success, or failure, will likely reverberate throughout the mobile world.

(See also Facebook Home: A Facebook Phone & A New Facebook Mobile Experience.)

Granted, Chat Heads' effectiveness is entirely contingent on the adoption rate of Facebook Home. After all, only those who indulge in obsessive Facebook use will really be gung-ho about jumping in the deep end with Home when it debuts on the Google Play store on April 12.

But if Home takes off, Chat Heads will undoubtedly prove to be one of the social network's most valuable assets. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's intentions are to increase the visibility and longterm use of Facebook Message - eclipsing all other services. Chat Heads could help him succeed.

Messaging Anywhere, Anytime... For Real This Time

Chat Heads' strength lies in its ease of use. While many messaging services like to promote themselves as "seamless," allowing for anytime, anywhere messaging, Chat Heads can actually back up that claim. There's no app to launch or multi-tasking menu bar to flip through. You can place the chat bubble anywhere on your display, or just flick it away when you need the screen real estate for something else.

Taking a page from Apple's iMessage book, the only thing that differentiates a message in Chat Heads from a SMS message is the color of the text bubble (green for text message, blue for Facebook Message). This functionality also plays into one of Facebook Home's core strengths - the ubiquitousness of the social network while using the skin. 

(See also Is Apple's iMessage Killing Texting After All?)

Obviously, having Home on your Android phone means you want to use Facebook as much as possible. But by bundling SMS and Facebook Message into Chat Heads, the social network is playing on your constant exposure to wean you off SMS and and onto Facebook Message. 

Since Chat Heads works works with SMS as well as Facebook Message, there's really no reason why Home user won't slide into the habit of replacing texts with Chat Heads. 

SMS Is King, But Facebook Message Is More Flexible

When Facebook rolled up its Chat and Message service into one platform back in 2010, some users were outraged. It stripped away the email-style "get-to-this-when-you-can" feel of Message in favor of Chat's quick back-and-forth, instant messaging style of communication.

But in making this switch, which most users eventually accepted, Facebook created a middle ground to build a substantial SMS competitor. After two years of growth, Facebook Message is now a platform to be reckoned with, and therein lays Chat Heads' true power. 

By not having to define itself as a texting alternative, an email-killer or an AOL IM revival service, Facebook Message exists as all three simultaneously, depending on whom you happen to be talking to. You don't really have to think about whether you need to use an outside app to send an email (a communication means that Facebook Home has completely buried in its interface), or which method may be best for a particular purpose. You can simply use Chat Heads to talk to anyone you know, and interact with them on whatever level you deem necessary. 

Like other alternative messaging services, Facebook Message is free, imposes no character limits and offers easy multimedia sharing. Add its visual attractiveness, ability to handle multiple conversations and flexibility as an email-text-IM hybrid and its easy to see how powerful Chat Heads could be. 

Android-Only Is Its Only Weakness

The most obvious hurdle facing Chat Heads as a true SMS alternative is the fact that iPhone owners won't be using it anytime soon. That means iMessage will still reign supreme for iDevices, and will keep its own share of the messaging service market intact. Of course, Zuckerberg would love to have an Apple version of Facebook Home, but that ball is in Cupertino's court. At last week's Facebook Home launch, Zuckerberg said that putting Home on iOS would require Apple's cooperation in ways that working with Android did not - although Facebook was in contact with Google over the project. Apple hasn't commented, but history has not been kind to moves that could wrest ecosystem control away from the Apple. 

That is a bummer. As an iPhone user, I'd love the opportunity to try Facebook Home, if only to check out Chat Heads. In a broader sense, an Apple version of Facebook Home would be a devastating blow to SMS as well as iMessage - all the more reason why Apple likely will never allow it. But even on Android alone, Facebook Home and Chat Heads could soon be the biggest, baddest new player in the messaging wars. 

Lead image by Fredric Paul.

Why HTML5? "If all of us are trying to overthrow SMS, it should use the network that's the most ubiquitous," says Steve Tran, the company's founder and CEO. An HTML5 framework lets the app work in any browser, mobile or otherwise. "We think messaging is likely to be a core application in the HTML5 frontier," he adds, noting that it offered the least restrictions.

Founded roughly nine months ago and based in Mountain View, Calif., Chorus is basically a team of four, three of whom previously worked together on a voice application platform called BeVocal acquired by Nuance Communications back in 2007. The team has received angel funding, but runs as a self-described lean operation with no immediate plan for venture capital investment. 

Biting The Dead Hand Of Carrier SMS

Chorus claims its app is the only HTML5, browser-centric messenger out there. But it will have to demonstrate some immediate advantages, because it's joining an all-out firefight in the instant-messaging market.

A growing crowd of services — such as, for instance, WhatsApp and WeChat — aim to kill off carrier-bound SMS and its unreasonably high fees and lack of social media integration. Built-in smartphone features such as Apple's iMessage have also been chipping away at the carriers' grip on text communication.

And it's not just in the U.S. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of Line, a messaging service popular in Japan that has joined the anti-SMS ranks, and also pointed out that "the rise of texting apps has taken away $23 billion in revenue from carriers as of the end of 2012...." Beyond Line, Samsung has ChatOn, Deutsche Telekom invested in Pinger, and Yahoo Japan purchased a 50% stake in the Japanese subsidiary of South Korea's KakaoTalk.

The point is that the war is raging, and to catch on and stand out in the field of messaging services is becoming almost as hard establishing a new social network. 

Almost Frictionless

Chorus calls itself "frictionless" because users can jump in and out of conversations while moving, say, from a laptop to a phone to a tablet — and with no registration required. Though a profile goes a long way toward making things easier. With Chorus, it's required if you want to initiate conversations. 

In other words, if somebody invites you to chat, you can accept and communicate, but you can't start conversations yourself unless you register with a username, email and password. (Alternatively, you can sync an account from Google+ or Facebook.) The service has also launched iOS and Android apps for the sole purpose of enabling mobile push notifications, something smartphone browsers don't allow at the moment. 

But random signups aren't how the Chorus team expects users to dive in. If you know someone's email address or phone number, you can pull them directly into a chat — again, no registration required on their part. And from there the new user can decide whether registering seems worth the trouble. 

Which means that Chorus effectively makes no distinction between its registered users and everyone else when it comes to chatting in the moment, a feature its team thinks will be key to its success.

"A lot of the over-the-top messaging apps, they're effectively all walled gardens. They're creating their own network," Tran says. With Chorus, there's no wall, and the garden is more like an open field. But naturally, that has its pros and cons.

Scaling The Walled Gardens

Services like Facebook Messenger or the popular mobile app WhatsApp are indeed walled gardens to varying degrees. But as Tran suggests, a service like Chorus will inevitably face the problem of pulling users away from ecosystems and buddy lists they're familiar with. At the end of the day, messaging comes down to ease, and if there's anything heavy mobile users are invested in, it's in the tool they use to text. 

Through straightforward integration, Chorus also lets you bring in contacts from your phone, Facebook and Google all into one address book. That's not new to the world of messaging services, though Chorus claims it lets you do so easily and in a way that saves you the hassle of building up yet another useless profile and trying to organize a contact list.

“In our worldview, users already have a friends list — it’s called their address book. They shouldn’t have to create a new one and should have the flexibility to immediately send messages to whomever they want," the company states in its official press release. 

Which is, effectively, the main draw of Chorus: its ability to let you reach anyone without having to worry about whether they're on a phone or a laptop, or iMessage or Google Talk or Facebook. In a space where there's so many different ways to communicate that it makes your head spin, to have a stripped down service that does what you want it to do is an ideal solution. If it catches on. 

While analysts and market watchers have good reason to think that the 160-character communication method won’t be seeing a historic comeback given the numerous free options available, the most recent death knells completely ignore how pervasive the traditional text message is in our communication culture and why that guarantees its survival right alongside email and the phone call.

They also ignore the fact that in the face of a decline in traditional text messaging, U.S. carriers will likely begin to buckle over keeping high rate plans, giving up their once-astronomical text profits for a chance to keep the market from slipping away completely.

It should go without saying that some communication media are used more than others depending on the technological climate, but the text message is nowhere near going the way of the fax machine for three reasons: it’s universal; it’s not confined to an OS or social network; and a huge chunk of the Internet generation grew up with it as an integral social tool.

Bridging Mobile Gaps

Not only does SMS support billions of phones worldwide, it simultaneously bridges numerous technological gaps in modern mobile tech - the distance between a regular cellphone and a smartphone, from carrier to carrier and across continents as well.

It’s very easy to write off such universality as a convenient perk of people’s reluctance to upgrade to a smartphone, but a data plan and a touch screen shouldn't be a requirement to use what is now one of the world’s most basic communication services.

Competition From Within A Walled Garden

Text messaging is as simple as it gets, and anything more than direct one-on-one communication involves dragging a consumer into a new environment with restrictions. That’s unfortunately exactly what you get with a good chunk of the messaging competition.

Two of the biggest of these competitors are Apple’s iMessage and Facebook Messenger. As for Apple’s offering, it’s quite obvious to see where the setbacks are in relying exclusively on an device-specific platform. Not only does it restrict you to someone with both an iPhone and the most recent iOS update, but iMessage has been known to crash quite often. Such outages can you leave you wondering whether or not any of your green bubbled texts have actually gone through, which is especially troublesome if you're trying to convey something important.

But at least Apple knows that to compete with SMS, you have to drill into the heart of where we’re used to texting, turning on iMessage automatically when it can and keeping it off when it has to. Facebook Messenger on the other hand seems to believe users will just shrug off massive annoyances and use its service as a perfect stand-in.

Facebook Doesn't Get It

For instance, the online visibility aspect and mandatory read receipt feature fundamentally alters how people can use Facebook as a communication platform. Having to be visible to an entire trove of Facebook friends removes a large level of intimacy and control that text messaging retains, often limiting the conversations you have on it to quick back-and-forths concerning a problem.

You can of course exclude some people or only be visible to a select few, but that involves the constant curation of lists.

As for forcing you to let others see when you’ve read your messages, this adds a disastrous level of urgency to a conversation and is one of many issues, alongside things like email push notifications, says ReadWrite’s Jon Mitchell, that lie at the heart of potential tech overload.

Being able to mitigate the flow of a conversation is inherent to non-verbal communication. Forcing users to either evade looking at the flashing chat tab in on their Facebook page, appear to be ignoring their friends or feel pressured to chat in constant real-time is staunchly unappealing. Even Apple’s iMessage allows you to disable the read receipt feature that is unchangeable in Facebook Messenger unless you download a third-party browser extension.

There are obviously lesser known alternatives, as well as some more elegant and simplified social network-based chat services, like the collection of Google services - Chat, Voice, Hangouts and Huddles. But again, the requirement that one have a Google email address, a Google Voice number, a Google+ account, and the Google+ mobile app downloaded is a little bit more complicated than just having a phone number and a service plan.

The Text Message Generation

With regard to many of my smartphone-owning friends, the text message is still the ground floor, with everything else from FaceTime and Skype to Facebook Messenger and G Chat just an extension. That’s likely because our generation - those who got cell phones right alongside their parents in or around middle school - latched onto text messaging as the natural evolution of services like AOL Instant Messenger, before there were alternatives and high monthly texting plans just came with the territory.

This attrition of social weight to the text message transformed it from a platform and perpetuated its popularity throughout the rise of the smartphone and social networks titans and the endless amount of alternatives aiming their sights at SMS. The way U.S. youth culture latched onto texting created entirely new social constructs, from the dangers of doing so while driving to the illegality of ‘sexting’ and cyber harassment.

Even today, the simplest form of establishing communication between a new acquaintance is likely the text message. It carries its own specific weight, somewhere between the professionalism of email and the ambiguity of friending on Facebook.

The Biggest Threat To Texting

As for the biggest threat to texting, it’s hard to place bets on anything but WhatsApp, the closest to a direct replacement of a phone’s text messaging client as possible. The makers of WhatsApp understand that messaging should not be confined within a social network or to a specific device with a limiting OS. They do that by offering all the tech benefits of smartphone communication while expanding the social aspect of their interface about as far as AIM, even opting to liken your contact list of friends who have also downloaded the app to a ‘buddy list’.

While co-founders and former Yahoo employees Jan Joum and Brian Acton keep a very low profile, their ambitions are large: tear down the carriers’ control of messaging, and do it while trumpeting an anti-advertising mantra that goes so far as to quote Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. Their mission in the simplest of terms, “Because we want to build a better SMS alternative. Because we believe we can. Because someday very soon everybody will have a smartphone,” reads their website.

They are certainly right about the inevitability of the smartphone. And 10 billion messages per day as of August 2012 is nothing to scoff at. But if the text message decline proves to be more slippery than everyone anticipates, don't be surprised to see carriers begin a price war to hang on to customers.

Whether services like WhatsApp, or the colossal tech companies’ own offerings, will suit up for the battle is uncertain. But what is clear is that SMS will be sticking around for a while, and won’t go without a fight when the time does come.