Greetings in the Egyptian dictionary is contacting family and friends and greeting them on festivals and special religious occasions. In the past, this used to happen using the telephone and very often lines were engaged and a congratulatory call would turn into complaining about bad telephone lines. In cases people had relatives abroad, they would go to the telephone central to conduct those calls. At the central, they would queue in long lines until the turn came for the lucky family to be squeezed into a booth to make their calls. This is following by screaming and wailing so that the other party could hear them, thanks to bad international connections.

With development, came cellular phones and short text messaging (SMS), which became the saviour for humanity from from land line telephones. At the press of a button, you are able to send messages to scores of people. At the beginning, those messages were written in English because those cell phones did not support Arabic at the time. At most, the messages contained few words and official greetings. Next came the ascii art messages, which were formed using shapes, letters, commas and dots. In order to read those messages, you had to have a cellphone of a make similar to the person who sent the message. I think that those messages in addition to the ring tones from the pre-MP3 era was the reason why Egyptians agree to not buy any cellphone other than the Nokia. Following that, Arabic was introduced to cellular phones, and with this development, came a new type of rhyming text messaging, which I think was imported from Gulf countries. These text messages were of the type “Happy Eid, New Clothes, Long Life, Laughter without Sighs, Unique Shoes, a Killed Martyr and Ebrahim Saeed.” (All the words rhyme in the Arabic original: ie: Happy Eid, with a book to read, and a cat to feed, and a friend in need, a friend indeed). The messages were mostly incomprehensible phrases aimed at conveying the greetings. After that, came multi-media and Third Generation technology messages as well as other applications which didn't effect SMS messaging much, perhaps due to economic reasons or because they appeared at the time when another new competition was in the market, like Facebook. Facebook, which is part of the social networking and Web 2.0 platforms. Among its main features are the ability to send all that your heart desires in terms of photographs, messages and even videos on to the ‘walls’ of people you may have never met face to face – without paying a penny. However, this development has not been able to eradicate SMS messages totally as the computer culture is not as widespread as cellphones in Egypt, where Egyptians consider the latter as a basic human right along on an equal footing to water and medicine.

Will the coming technology impact the greetings market especially since cellular phone and DSL companies will not easily give up their rights in the few coins left in the pockets of Egyptians? People too will not stop looking for new ways to connect with each other, either as a means to save money or to show off or for both reasons together.