On Facebook, Many SMS Apps Find Little Use
Earlier this morning I met with Sarik Weber, co-founder of Hamburg, Germany-based mobile callback service, Cellity. He brought me up to speed on his company, but he also mentioned that they had launched a Facebook application that allows you to send free SMS messages to anyone worldwide.
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2008, Hamburg-based callback startup Cellity — co-founded by Sarik Weber — launched a Facebook application offering free worldwide SMS, betting that the social network's massive reach could substitute for carrier billing. But as this report notes, many SMS apps on the platform found little actual use, an early signal that social-graph distribution alone couldn't overcome messaging habits tied to the phone's native inbox. The pattern kept recurring: Vonage later let users call Facebook friends free from iPhone or Android, and Facebook itself experimented with carrier-facing text products like Zero, a text-only mobile site.
First-order effects
- Cellity gains a viral distribution channel for its free-SMS service, but low engagement across similar Facebook apps means the app likely serves more as marketing for Cellity's core callback product than as a standalone usage driver.
- Users who do adopt it can bypass per-message carrier fees for international texting, putting marginal pressure on SMS revenue at the edges of heavy Facebook-using demographics.
Second-order effects
- Carriers face a slow erosion of international SMS margins as over-the-top players keep attaching free messaging to large existing user bases — a threat that grows as Facebook builds its own mobile infrastructure rather than hosting third-party apps.
- Competing VoIP and texting startups are pushed to seek their own distribution beyond app platforms, since a Facebook tab proves insufficient to change where people actually send messages.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows the shift from third-party SMS apps on social platforms to platforms owning messaging outright — a path Facebook ultimately took by building Messenger into a destination that, years later, re-added native SMS support on Android after first pulling it.
- If social networks keep absorbing communication functions, telcos' messaging revenue structurally migrates toward data plans and platform-owned channels, leaving carriers as pipes while OTT services capture the user relationship.
The trend: This is an early data point in the decade-long migration of SMS traffic from carrier-controlled billing to internet platforms that own both the social graph and the messaging client.