Forbes Magazine points out the complexities associated with sending pictures from mobile phone cameras between carriers. They report that IDC believes that "{by} the end of 2004, consumers will have sent 3.8 billion multimedia messages, which are mostly photographs". That's amazing because camera phones didn't really become widely available in the U.S. until last year.

One big impediment to further growth is the fact that it's tough to send pictures between carriers. Most carriers have offered gateways to a limited number of carriers, ususally by establishing exchange capabilities on a bi-lateral basis. Forbes suggests that a lot of carriers are going to outsource transfer of photos between carriers, because it's difficult to run a multimedia messaging service center with connections to every other carrier in the known universe.

This is a good article that helps pin down when inter-carrier MMS exchange will become easy. It's not going to happen overnight, but there's too much money to be made for this to take too much longer. [ via MobileTracker ]