Record number of texts on New Years Eve

22/11/2007

Wishing friends and family a happy new year via SMS has become as much a New Year’s Eve tradition as Auld Lang Syne.

In fact, New Year’s Eve has consistently proved the busiest day of the year for text messaging, with 165m text messages sent in the UK last year.

That means that from midnight on New Year's Eve to midnight on New Year's Day, an average of 6.9m messages were sent each hour as people rushed to wish each other a happy new year. There was frustration for some though as networks failed to cope with demand.

Critics have accused the SMS trend of undermining traditional methods of communication, particularly against young people. This view gained some support when a professor at University College London undertook to condense the words of some of English literature's classic tomes into a few lines of text as a learning aid.

Even the bible has been converted into SMS. Australia’s Bible Society took on the challenge in 2005 of translating all 31,173 verses of the Bible into text-speak with the aim of attracting young people to its contents.

Other developments for text messaging have included the first self-destruct text message, developed by UK firm Staellium, which deletes itself minutes after being sent to set paranoid texters' minds at rest.