The UK's love of text messaging is continuing to grow, recent figures from the Mobile Data Association show, despite the rise of "social messaging" via services like Twitter.

The just released stats take into account both text messages and picture and video messages with info aggregated from each of the UK's mobile network operators.

During 2009 the UK saw a daily average of 265 million text messages and 1.6 million picture messages with the year's total coming in at a massive 96.8 billion text messages and 600 million picture messages.

As with previous years, the Christmas period and New Years saw a rise in mobile phone messaging with Christmas up 31% on 2008 and New Years up 21%.

"These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity", says Steve Reynolds, the chairman of the MDA, in the press release.

"There remains a significant and still developing role for text messaging. In a seemingly relentless tide of status updates, tweets and pokes, the UK population’s love affair with mobile messaging for instant, on-the-go communication continues to deepen".

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