Once upon a time, SMS was the crowning achievement of communications technology. It combined email’s asynchronous archive of messages with a portable device, allowing anyone to send and receive information anywhere they were. Today, widespread mobile internet access has somewhat eclipsed the main functionality of SMS, but it remains a dominant form for communication in many markets and in particular business cases.
Perhaps because we are constantly swamped with push notifications, they can go overlooked as a messaging category. They are nevertheless an important medium of modern communication, and a more diverse one than you might think. Push notifications initialize interactions between a recipient and a sender, in an era of communication where response times are measured in seconds. Such high-frequency information requires effective distillation to remain efficient and to avoid flooding recipients with noise.