A new mobile trend seems to be emerging in Finland, and mind you the Finns tend to know a thing or two about the mobile industry.

It seems Finnish carriers have recorded a sharp decline in SMS messaging over the holidays. Sonera saw the number drop from 10.9 million last year to 8.5 million a week ago. Carriers in Hong Kong and Australia have reported similar declines, 14 percent and 9 percent respectively.

The decline seems to coincide with the expansion of social networking services, namely Twitter and Facebook, so the trend is hardly surprising. People are simply shifting to new media, the same way Christmas cards were killed off by annoying emails and text messages a decade ago.

Interestingly Americans seem to be sending even more SMS messages, in spite of their love affairs with social networking.