Wednesday, April 7, 2010

LOLs & Triple Word Scores

I want to get one thing clear here: I hate text messaging. Absolutely loathe it.

So, when I wrote yesterday's blog post about texting, I had to ask myself: do I really believe this?

The answer, of course, is yes, even if I don't like it myself.

Why? The numbers speak for themselves. Eighty-eight percent of Gen Y cell phone users use their phones to text. A quarter of them send over 50 text messages a day. Forty-one percent of Gen Y users do not own a land line.

I don't like texting mostly because I have an old candy bar phone that is not very conducive to text messaging, but I'd be a fool to dismiss it as a fad. I believe text messaging is here to stay and is a very effective way to communicate, even if I don't do it as much myself.

Changes are inevitable, but many people are still stagnant and staunch in their views of the past. This week, for example, it was announced that Scrabble was changing their rules for the first time in its 60-odd year history to include proper nouns (a Bjork Triple Word Score, anyone?). Waves of fans cried foul, only to discover that it was a special edition that was getting the change, not the game as a whole.

Of course, the real estate industry has been no different. Many agents were staunch in their old ways of doing things - fax machines, driving around town, dialing with rotary phones. A sea-change is happening now, of course, and most agents realize the benefits of going online, signing up with a social media site, and even embracing text messaging.

The question is, are you one of them?

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