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Instant "supertxt" SMS adds fun. Comverse removes it.

"Give SMS "a new spirit of fun!" suggests Dror Bin. "Colour, emoticons and icons are all part of the service's improved look and feel." It's "Instant SMS" and it appears to have gone the lead balloon route so far.

Part of the blame for the world's indifference to the idea of a super-text service has to be laid at the door of Dror Bin and his advertising advisers at Comverse.

Instead of focusing on the spirit of fun, or emoticons and icons, the announcement began by including nearly all the giveaway catchphrases which normally warn journalists to read no further, starting with the deadliest of them all: "world's leading..."

The press announcement has been reproduced, in full, but by just three news outlets; and if you read it, you can see why...

Comverse, the world’s leading supplier of software and systems enabling network-based multimedia enhanced communication and billing services, today announced availability of the Comverse Hosted Instant SMS Solution.

If that left any readers still awake, the next paragraph dealt with them:

Hosting speeds time-to-market and can optimize use of operator resources when deploying Instant SMS, which infuses key elements of the Internet culture into the existing SMS and MMS messaging services while preserving the successful user experience of each.

The meat of the announcement, of course, isn't aimed at text users, but at operators. The product is called "Comverse Hosted Instant SMS" and the incentive for operators is not excitement, but financial. "Try it, you'll like it, and you don't have to pay to install it up front."

But that message also, was well hidden. To quote the release again, it "

gives operators an attractive alternative to purchasing the service and deploying it on premises, reducing time-to-market and capital expenditure, cost-effectively phasing in the service according to growing usage."

 Freed from service-related concerns such as infrastructure, hardware, software and IT application support, the operator can focus on its core competencies to ensure the greatest market success. Comverse hosting facilities already serve hundreds of millions of messaging transactions each month for operators around the globe of all sizes, from greenfields to international tier-1 giants.

All true, no doubt.

It's also, probably, true that tofu is good food... but you wouldn't want to eat a spoonful of it on its own without careful preparation.

Read Comverse's SMS release in all its gloom

Study the product itself on Comverse's web page