Even before phone texting, the cool students were abusing the "call back" number on pagers.
GRAND CENTRAL
HACK THE PLANETI heard recently that the "text to vote" for American Idol was actually a marketing push from cell carriers to get kids to text. Before that it apparently wasn't very popular, and it's one of those "If you get them to do it once, they'll do it again" tech thresholds.
Also around the same time, Twitter came out and had the gimmick of being able to text-to-post.
That was not a gimmick, that was their core feature at the time. You have to remember that Twitter launched before mobile internet (cell or wifi) was common place, and the fact that you could link your number turned every dumb flip phone into a twitter capable device. Sure by 2010, smartphones had taken over, but for 3-4 years that was one of the main ways people interacted with Twitter.
I meant gimmick in the sense of a unique feature that distinguished it from all the other message boards and social networking things that existed at that time. Nobody I knew used texting to post (because it was expensive in those days of charging per character), but it got a lot of press for being able to post from your phone.
I was in high school in mid to late 90s. I had a tiny Samsung that to this day I miss with its tiny form factor - smaller than a Razor. It definitely had texting abilities, but I was a total hermit and had no friends back then, so I don't know.
By "no one" you must mean everyone not in high school. Texting was a huge cultural thing in the US even before smartphones.