Liu Suxin, an 80-year-old lady in Guangzhou, took off her presbyopic glasses and smiled contently. This year, she did a thing that she had never done on the New Year's Eve. She had her oral New Year's greetings typed into a text message by her granddaughter. Then she looked up in the directory, and sent this message by her mobile phone to her 17 old friends and colleagues.
 
Since May 17th, 2000 when the first text message was sent from China Mobile, short messages have been growing at an amazing annual rate of over 40 percent in China. The statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry shows that in 2006, 429.6 billion short messages were sent in the country. Message service became the first pot of gold for data service, which finally made data service as competitive as voice service.

"Short message service has become the last straw for domestic Internet operators ever since China Mobile released the sharing model with value-added service providers in the second half of 2001." Lv Benfu, Director of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Center of Internet Studies at that time, told the reporter, "In the capital market, the stocks of China's three portal websites have become the stocks of wireless value-added service providers."

The investors' decision is actually based on the fiscal reports of the three portal websites. From November 2002, the seasonal fiscal reports of sohu.com, sina.com and netease.com all showed profits for the first time, in which message service income accounted for over a half of the total income. In 2004, with purely wireless value-added concepts, linkstone.com and kongzhong.com successfully launched NASDAQ exchange. Message service, like fresh sunshine, shined the Internet industry having experienced two-year winter seasons, and then began to show its full glare.

Compared with portal websites, tencent.com, an earlier comer to the message service, benefited more. As one of the first Monternet partners with China Mobile, Tencent.com began to gain profits from message service as early as in 2000, two years before the three portal websites. At that time, the major product of the company is mobile QQ, which still remains the best-known and widely used product in wireless value-added industry chain. According to Tencent.com, it was just the close cooperation with Guangdong Mobile that helped Tencent.com out of the toughest time. Message service provides a stable source of income, which enables its sustainable development and constant innovation in products.

The fact that Portal websites gained profits from message service reflects the preference of Chinese mobile phone users on short message service. Statistics also support this conclusion. In 2000, messages sent in China only accounted for 1 percent of the world total, while in 2006, this proportion jumped up to 60 percent. A third-party investigating institution said that in 2010, the proportion will further rise to nearly 80 percent.

It is deniable that the rapid development of message service is closely related to the increasingly wider use of mobile phone. In 2006, mobile phone users grew at a monthly rate of 5.64 million on average in China. Mobile phone users exceeded 460 million, with 35.3 percent of mobile phone penetration rate.

However, the miracle that China's message service made in the world communication market relies more on the accurate decision made by major operators which are consistent with China's reality and cultural tradition. With voice service developing more widely, the operators grasped the new demands of the consumers sensitively and launched message service promptly. China Mobile said that on one hand, new mobile phone users consumes less on average and are more sensitive to prices, so the message price of less than 0.1 yuan is easier to accept for them. On the other hand, the traditionally low profiled and shy character of Chinese people makes text messages the first choice to express their feelings. The message blowouts at major festivals therefore have become the unique features of China's wireless communication service.

Message service based on Internet is experiencing a new change. Mobile QQ will easily provide you with the weather forecast from the Meteorological Bureau and news from traditional media now. Meanwhile, Tencent.com also plans to integrate other Internet services with its message platform. For example, in the near future, people can update their blogs by mobile phones, write down what they see and hear every day in each possible vacancy time by mobile phones, and upload them in the form of messages. In this way, blogs and mobile communication can be better integrated. Like Tencent.com, more and more service providers began deeper and wider cooperation with mobile operators, and launched win-win schemes according to their own advantages.

Among the multiple attempts, message application becomes more and more popular with its convenience and speed. Besides regional short messages, in finance, users can easily get the information of personal account and specific charges; in transportation, in many cities, administration can inform the drivers who broke traffic rules in form of short messages; in agriculture, short messages can provide farmers with information on agriculture and market, and serve as a better information channel for farmers; in media, more and more viewers are involved in the interaction with media via message platforms.

The information transformation of every industry via message platform is changing the uniformity trend of personal messages and becomes the major trend of future development of message service.