The slow uptake of MMS has been well documented. While it’s been somewhat successful as a content delivery platform, picture messaging as an application has been much less so. A new analyst report says people get turned off by poor image quality and poor usability, which is completely unsurprising. What’s a bit more interesting, though, is that they note about 60 percent of cameraphone owners intended to share pictures through messaging services before they bought their phone — but only 28 percent of them actually do so after using their device.
In other words, half the people that want to share photos before they get a cameraphone end up not doing so once they’ve tried it. That seems a pretty damning indictment of the usability of current services and devices. Certainly devices can be a pain to use, particularly in the way of getting the correct settings established for data connections, but I’m confident this area’s improving. But I’ve got little hope that services are getting any better or easier to use.
Operators need to re-examine the entire user experience of picture messaging and photo sharing, from cost to set-up to message creation to delivery. Clearly the idea of sending one-to-one messages has failed to resonate with users, at least a current pricing levels. Moblogs and posting to services like Flickr seems more popular — but often operator implementations of these services leave a lot to be desired.
So what can operators do to improve the picture messaging and photo sharing experience?
Any thoughts?
(graphic by vork, from moblog UK)
Amazing stuff.
One issue is that photo websites CAN’T accept a MMS, because we don’t have MMS shortcodes yet.
So email is still the preferred way of getting a photo from a phone to a photo sharing website.
I think that it’s going to take some time before cameraphones really move beyond the point of being a gimmick. While I use mine (a RAZR) for moblogging, the lack of quality - both in image and speed/service - is a hurdle.
The biggest problem as I see it is with the user interface of most phones. It just takes too long to send anything meaningful, and to be honest things will only get interesting once mobile input is streamlined and _more_ than just images and a sentence or two of text can be sent in a snap. When or if that will happen remains to be seen.
Im on the crew of mobilblogg.net and almost ALL of our users use MMS for their moblogging (pictures, headlines, text and movieclips). I guess sending MMSes are easier than setting up the mail on the mobile?
Anywas, we have had som problems with some carriers, because they put some HTML stuff into the MMS created, (a template and some ads). Every new carrier we support is very important to us, and it is getting easier and easier.
So maybe MMS is easier for the moblogger to use, but email is easier for the guys (like us) coding and providing the moblogservice.
absolutely spot on Carlo, and I *know* MNO’s are reading your and other blogs around mobile where this is coming up again and again.
@ william - concerning MMS to photo sites, mms to web is fine, in fact almost all handsets have a “send to email address” in their MMS functionality. The trick lies in the receiving sites mail parser (and this is in answer to Muzagga really), as a moblogging site you have to write specific scripts for *every* carrier, stripping out the accompanying spam, and deciphering their jpg encoding in order to publish it to the moblog. All good moblog sites are constantly developing this side of their service to cater to changes in the way operators send mms to email.
This is a really important post Carlo, I hope the carriers are paying attention
being the not clever part of mbuk, mat knows:
“For future reference:
“deciphering their jpg encoding”
There’s only one way to encode a jpg, and that’s as a jpg. We don’t actually decode anything, that’s done by your web browser. Occasional messages have corrupt jpg headers, but that’s nothing to do with the carriers.
“specific scripts for *every* carrier”
We don’t have specific scripts for every carrier, we have a few switches that handle specific cases, but the general system handles the vast majority of carriers, even the weirdy ones.”
there I go with my *I understand it speak*.
Great post Carlo.
I’d love to be in a mobile industry where the handset manufacturers made it easy to get at the handset hardware from the internet. While it is only possible to upload pix via MMS and email, that remains a big barrier to developing better apps.
If a 3rd party app could use a more flexible and faster transport to upload handset media to a server it would really help developers build better apps. Better apps might drive more use, increase imaging revenue for carriers. Maybe that could help convince carriers to get their fingers out of it and be happy with the additional data revenue.
Hope we see an open-source phone soon! Go Surj Patel!
[...] Is the implied surprise/disappoinment here that so few US users are sending photos, or so many? I think 20 percent’s a pretty good number, considering the track record of MMS. I think the article and the stat also miss the point that cameraphones exist for plenty of reasons beyond sending MMS, such as acting as a digital memory device. But, as I’ve said before, if operators want to get more people sending images from their mobile, there’s a lot of ways they can improve. [...]
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