I mentioned it in a earlier post, pull is in nearly all situations better than push. Ross seems to share this view in The Cost of Presence:

Heck, the most efficient ways of communicating rich presence is asynchronous (blog posts, Flickr, Plazes) and yet to be integrated -- there is no Xfire (* see below) for real worlds.

When you factor in the rise of RSS as a Pull mechanism that the receiver controls -- there is a significant shift underway to make senders pay. If you don't write a worthwhile blog post, people don't pay attention.

He also speaks about the privacy issue in regard to cellphones:

When cell phones capture and constantly transmit spatial presence we may be in for the biggest privacy shock of our time. Like a camera over our shoulder, only it's in your pocket, everywhere and nearly always on. Social norms will significantly evolve.

Here I would be interested to know who asians countries do handle this. They have GPS-enabled phones since around 2003.

* Xfire and Persistent Presence

Xfire takes this to the next level. It creates a profile about a user actually does, and allows others to see it. Imagine if you will, running a piece of software that watched what you did online. It could tell where you spent your time online and what you were connected to currently. If you were in an IRC channel, it could point your friends to the IRC channel. If you were posting a lot on a specific message board or wiki, it could tell your friends that's what you'd been up to recently.

Couldn't we consider that Audioscrobbler is going into this direction?

Tages-Anzeiger asks:

Ist der Handy-Boom vorbei?
Die Swisscom leidet nicht nur unter dem Preiszerfall im Telefonie-Geschäft. Es wird auch weniger telefoniert. Um vier Minuten ist die Gesprächsdauer je Kunde im Vergleich zum Vorjahr zurück gegangen. Die Zahl der verschickten SMS schrumpfte sogar um 14 Prozent.

Is the Handy Boom over?
Swisscom Mobile customers were 4 minutes less on the phone than the year before. And they sent 14% less SMS. Maybe that's one of the reasons for Swisscom's SMS Group.
For sure the mobile boom is not over. But instead of milking the SMS cash cow till it's too much, wouldn't it be better to make the mobile internet more attractive?

A British survey on text usage from Reuters.

British men are almost twice as likely to use their mobile phones for talking compared with women, who prefer to text, according to research on Wednesday.

"The fact that women are more likely to be texters could suggest that women now see mobile phones as extremely social tools," said Ellen Shiels, senior market analyst at Mintel.

"They can stay in touch with each other and make arrangements to meet without getting drawn into a long conversation."

Via Emily

*** a little self promo ***
A simple comparison between SMS Group by Swisscom and mobile KAYWA weblogs. Instead of sending or retrieving messages via SMS, you read a KAYWA weblog if you want and comment it.
Ok. This is not push. But do we really need push most of the time? Isn't push the stuff which is a burden for all of us?

Cost of SMS Group:
Every message between CHF 0.20 and CHF 0.40

Cost of reading a KAYWA post and leaving a comment on your mobile (via GPRS)
(now especially easy by clicking Latest Comments in Navigation)
According to the data of the page between CHF 0.03 and CHF 0.08 officially, but Swisscom is so kind to always charge CHF 0.10.
Still you spend 2 to 4 times less than with SMS Group.