Dealing with Facebook text message delay

I recently switched to an unlimited text and data plan for my cell phone and thought I'd give Facebook and Twitter a chance to show me why it is so important to know instantly what each and everyone of my internet-enabled friends are up to RIGHT NOW. Well, I didn't go crazy, I turned on text message notifications for about 3 people. I came to notice pretty quickly that the meaning "right now" varies wildly according to time of day. That's expected to a degree, with all the people coming home to microblog how crappy a day they have had, but it's annoying when I get a text message at 2am about something that happened at 8pm after telling Facebook that I don't want to receive any messages after 11pm.

I can't say for sure if this is a problem on Facebook's side or a carrier issue. I've been reading a lot about congestion issues in regards to 3G, especially with AT&T. For the purposes of finding a solution though, it's not that important. The ways to mitigate the problem are mostly the same, it just the question of who implements them. In a perfect world, both sides would work on it, but as recent insights into the profit structure of the text message business show, cell phone carriers are increasing profits while keeping infrastructure investments flat for the most part.

Now, for all the importance that text messages are carrying today they are comparably unreliable. There is no SLA and as I mentioned, the infrastructure investments are lagging behind skyrocketing usage. At the same time, a high amount of messages associated with social networking and micro-blogging are both broadcasts and highly immediate. That means that their is no express expectation of delivery on the receiving end and that their perceived value drops sharply with delivery time. Therefor, paradoxically, the low expectation of reliability could be used to increase reliability overall by decreasing congestion volume.

This could be done relatively simple by attaching an expiration time to certain classes of messages like broadcasts. In the example above, a status update at 8pm triggers a text message to be sent to each subscriber. Now, I personally wouldn't care about a status update that's 2 hours late, but let's just go with a default expiration time of 4 hours. If the message can't be delivered by midnight, it gets discarded and purged from the sender queue. Odds are nobody would care about the information anyhow, and there's a good chance the receiver already found out since the same information is accessible in other ways.
Now, in my own example, since the message was sent at 8pm and I don't want to receive messages after 11pm, the expiration time could be set to 3 hours. If it can't be delivered in 3 hours, it eases congestion and I don't get annoyed by messages I don't care about in the middle of the night.