Mobile service has become an essence in people’s daily life and the robust basis to promote mobile commerce. Understanding how the mobile service diffuse across a nation has thus become crucial for executives who want to take the first lead on the mobile commerce competition. Using a macro view that is different to the existing mobile service literature, this study aims to reveal the determinants of consumers’ mobile service use behavior: whether the diffusion of mobile services is affected more by mass media advertising and salespeople, or interactions and imitations among acquaintances.

Longitudinal data provided quarterly by the Department of Industrial Technology of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan between 1989 to 2008 was examined by three diffusion models. GNUS, a strongly functional language and environment to statistically explore data sets, was used to estimate the parameters of each model. The performance of each diffusion model was then examined using the Akaike AIC and Schwarz BIC statistics.

Findings indicated that (1) acquaintances’ influence in terms of interactions is the dominant factor shaping mobile services’ adoption decision; and (2) the Von Bertalanffy mixed influences model best describes the diffusion pattern of mobile services’ adoption.

As every innovation has its own unique feature, this study may have helped managers to realize that for mobile technology-based products, interpersonal communication rather than mass media advertising is the best way to facilitate their market share. Consequently, to promote m-commerce such as mobile Internet usage or mobile shopping, seeking alliance opportunities with mobile e-mail, mobile messengers, famous Weblogs and Web communities that have been built by intensive user communication and interaction may be an effective tacit. Future studies may explore other macro-level factors (e.g. government policies, infrastructure of mobile services’ connections, government support in the development of mobile handsets and Internet contents) that have not been discussed in this study.