Why Don't More People Use Facebook's SMS Applications?

Om Malik observes that SMS apps on Facebook get very little usage.  Although he found three dozen of them, the most popular only get around 500 daily users in an environment where games like Scrabulous get 1,000 times that.  He further observes that Facebook VoIP widgets suffer a similar fate and posits that despite Daniel Berninger's argument for the utility of a social directory, people in Facebook don't really want to communicate with each other in real time.

I've observed the same phenomenon but have a somewhat different theory.  Facebook encourages a definition of "friend" that encompasses a much larger group than those people I would want to interrupt with an SMS or a phone call.  If I know someone well enough to SMS or call them, I already have them in my contact list and synced to my mobile phone from which I can message or call them without opening any widgets.  There is still plenty of utility in tying Facebook to SMS - Facebook's own Mobile app gets more than 370,000 daily users, but it provides unique functionality such as broadcasting news feeds.  I think there is plenty of opportunity to use SMS as a way of connecting people with applications, but if two people just want to talk to each other they will reach for the phone.

Comments

[Mark Waks]

As usual, it's the wrong question. The correct one is why *would* people use them? If you want point-to-point communication, direct SMS works better. If you want broadcast, a simple-minded SMS app doesn't help much. Really, you probably want something nuanced, and they're mostly much too simplistic for that. A "directory" doesn't mean much in and of itself: the use cases are the important bit.

So really -- what are these things good for? They look like solutions chasing problems to me...