6 ms·

why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that usefu

by ice109 9y ago

why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?

oceanswave 9y ago
In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have come and gone throughout the years - from icq to msn messenger to yahoo messenger to Skype to WhatsApp to kik to Line, often enough it's that the app itself gets bloated to the point where the fundamental messaging capability becomes secondary and folks move away to something that just works - or is easier and takes advantage of a new paradigm in discoverability and that becomes where you find most of your community.
- btown 9y ago
  WeChat is the perfect counterexample here, and I think it speaks to why a company like Amazon would love to "own the bloat." For western markets, if Apple or Facebook is equivalent to WeChat with their pervasive messaging platforms, and Amazon is the equivalent of Alibaba, then the war between them alluded to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_serv... tells you all you need to know about why this is a crucial battlefront. It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.
  - otoburb 9y ago
    This hits the nail on the head. Western companies have seen the massive ecosystem that WeChat provides via their highly effective messaging UI and belatedly realize through their corporate and fiduciary duty bound value systems that there is a whole 'nother level they must aspire to. When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner. By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.
- Aileen343 9y ago
  Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt
huac 9y ago
yes, and also for advertising if amazon can start selling ads to you, based on what you're talking about, that would be much more desirable than ads based only on viewing/purchasing history. messaging in particular is also a really viral phenomenon - you choose your app based on where your friends are and you don't switch. having a loyal captive audience is really useful to start selling to, a la wechat payments or other value add services where you can take some transaction fee. this fits very well with amazon's overarching business model of 'middlemanning every transaction'
Jtsummers 9y ago
Many applications are really messaging apps underneath, even when it's less obvious (see many multi-player, non-realtime, games; and some realtime ones). They already possess the infrastructure for all of this. The next thing to do for these companies is keep people inside their environment longer so that they spend money within that environment. An Amazon messaging service principally gives you, well, chat with others. Then they build gaming applications that use that infrastructure. Open it up to 3rd parties to use this (like Apple's Game Center, but not constrained to iOS). Now you're getting rent from game developers. It's probably easily integrated with other services (video and music, for shared consumption experiences like when my GF and I, 5k miles apart, want to watch a movie together, not that we'd make use of that, we never have the same movies available on the same service at the same time anyways). And if they actually do this, note the last feature: chat with businesses. WhatsApp screwed the pooch on that one. My GF is in Argentina, many people use WhatsApp as their primary chat (and often voice) mechanism. Businesses want to use it, but they practically can't. WhatsApp is tied to a single device (maybe get the web client going and you've got two). It's tied to a single mobile device at that. And businesses that tried to use it (often using 3rd party software to make it practical for their use-cases) ended up with accounts closed (that they'd have to reopen, a pain in the ass). Apple can't offer that feature because they keep their messaging clients tied to their hardware. iOS devices are not practical in many countries still (due to either the local economy being too poor, or the government adding high taxes to iDevices in particular). Google could have taken this market, but, well they don't have a fucking clue how to pick a goal and stick with it. They keep adding new messaging clients every other month that aren't always compatible with the old ones. Amazon barely makes hardware (Fire Stick, Kindle, Kindle Fire, the Echo devices). They don't care about winning on hardware, they want to win on services. They're more than happy to offer their stuffs on any device it can run on as long as it increases their presence (which leads to an increase in spending on their platform).
- Ainsleylopo 9y ago
  My mothers neighbour is working part time and averaging $9000 a month. I'm a single mum and just got my first paycheck for $6546! I still can't believe it. I tried it out cause I got really desperate and now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
sidcool 9y ago
The Enterprise space is quite competetive in messaging space. Microsoft is the clear winner so far, followed closely by Google.
- austenallred 9y ago
  ...Slack?
  - ty_a 9y ago
    Unless there is a self hosted requirement.
- ginko 9y ago
  Why is MS trying their hardest to kill Skype, then?
  - relaxitup 9y ago
    They are? Haven't they been pushing Skype for Business pretty hard, considering also that they have supplanted Communicator/Lync with it as well?
- ice109 9y ago
  what's the MS solution? shows that i've never worked in enterprise that i don't even know
austenallred 9y ago
Because messaging is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and because WhatsApp, Messenger and Slack now have platforms that almost anything and everything can be built on, producing ungodly amounts of money.
- detaro 9y ago
  Which one of those are really producing "ungodly amounts of money"? They have tons of users, but as far as I know WhatsApp and Messenger don't have much in the way of commercial integration to "build almost anything and everything" yet?
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  Is there any publicly available proof that WhatsApp, Messenger, or Slack are producing godly amounts of money? Because as far as I can tell: * WhatsApp only produced large amounts of money for the founders but never profited and was intentionally never priced for massive profits. * Messenger's monitization efforts have only been experimental so far, and those experiments have been lackluster from a revenue standpoint. * Slack's financials are private and their most recent revenue claims that I have found are two years old but only $30M which would still be substantially far away from the billion dollar range even if they were in the 99th percentile of growth rates for VC backed companies. In fact, industry estimates are that the market for messaging is growing but still <$10B. When compared to the sort of money that a single company makes from advertising on their search engine, some might say that messaging is still producing very normal human levels of money and nowhere near ungodly territory.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Butterfield has talked about Slack's revenue already being in the billions
m_ke 9y ago
Retention and engagement. https://www.statista.com/statistics/417780/mobile-messenger-app-retention/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/417780/mobile-messenger-...
hooluupig 9y ago
If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried several times to make a successful messaging platform but fails repeatedly(just like Google's messaging mess). If facebook move in WeChat's direction,it will be a huge threat to amazon.Please excuse for my bad English as i am not a native speaker.
- subpixel 9y ago
  Exactly this. WeChat is an example of what Amazon can possibly do that no other US company is remotely capable of. I was going to say I can imagine an app that combines FB Messenger, Yelp, Travelocity, OpenTable, GrubHub, and Uber. But WeChat already has all these things (either via companies they own or via partnerships). Amazon also has Prime, so they can offer millions of subscribers incentives to prime the AnyTime pump.
- astebbin 9y ago
  Can Facebook and other US tech companies move in WeChat's direction successfully, in the West? Why did WeChat take off as such an everything-application in China? Do the same necessary motivations and trends exist elsewhere? I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally - or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari. Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps. Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?

by ice109 9y ago

why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?

oceanswave 9y ago

In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have come and gone throughout the years - from icq to msn messenger to yahoo messenger to Skype to WhatsApp to kik to Line, often enough it's that the app itself gets bloated to the point where the fundamental messaging capability becomes secondary and folks move away to something that just works - or is easier and takes advantage of a new paradigm in discoverability and that becomes where you find most of your community.

btown 9y ago
WeChat is the perfect counterexample here, and I think it speaks to why a company like Amazon would love to "own the bloat." For western markets, if Apple or Facebook is equivalent to WeChat with their pervasive messaging platforms, and Amazon is the equivalent of Alibaba, then the war between them alluded to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_serv... tells you all you need to know about why this is a crucial battlefront. It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.
- otoburb 9y ago
  This hits the nail on the head. Western companies have seen the massive ecosystem that WeChat provides via their highly effective messaging UI and belatedly realize through their corporate and fiduciary duty bound value systems that there is a whole 'nother level they must aspire to. When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner. By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.
Aileen343 9y ago
Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt

huac 9y ago

yes, and also for advertising if amazon can start selling ads to you, based on what you're talking about, that would be much more desirable than ads based only on viewing/purchasing history. messaging in particular is also a really viral phenomenon - you choose your app based on where your friends are and you don't switch. having a loyal captive audience is really useful to start selling to, a la wechat payments or other value add services where you can take some transaction fee. this fits very well with amazon's overarching business model of 'middlemanning every transaction'

Jtsummers 9y ago

Many applications are really messaging apps underneath, even when it's less obvious (see many multi-player, non-realtime, games; and some realtime ones). They already possess the infrastructure for all of this. The next thing to do for these companies is keep people inside their environment longer so that they spend money within that environment. An Amazon messaging service principally gives you, well, chat with others. Then they build gaming applications that use that infrastructure. Open it up to 3rd parties to use this (like Apple's Game Center, but not constrained to iOS). Now you're getting rent from game developers. It's probably easily integrated with other services (video and music, for shared consumption experiences like when my GF and I, 5k miles apart, want to watch a movie together, not that we'd make use of that, we never have the same movies available on the same service at the same time anyways). And if they actually do this, note the last feature: chat with businesses. WhatsApp screwed the pooch on that one. My GF is in Argentina, many people use WhatsApp as their primary chat (and often voice) mechanism. Businesses want to use it, but they practically can't. WhatsApp is tied to a single device (maybe get the web client going and you've got two). It's tied to a single mobile device at that. And businesses that tried to use it (often using 3rd party software to make it practical for their use-cases) ended up with accounts closed (that they'd have to reopen, a pain in the ass). Apple can't offer that feature because they keep their messaging clients tied to their hardware. iOS devices are not practical in many countries still (due to either the local economy being too poor, or the government adding high taxes to iDevices in particular). Google could have taken this market, but, well they don't have a fucking clue how to pick a goal and stick with it. They keep adding new messaging clients every other month that aren't always compatible with the old ones. Amazon barely makes hardware (Fire Stick, Kindle, Kindle Fire, the Echo devices). They don't care about winning on hardware, they want to win on services. They're more than happy to offer their stuffs on any device it can run on as long as it increases their presence (which leads to an increase in spending on their platform).

Ainsleylopo 9y ago
My mothers neighbour is working part time and averaging $9000 a month. I'm a single mum and just got my first paycheck for $6546! I still can't believe it. I tried it out cause I got really desperate and now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com

sidcool 9y ago

The Enterprise space is quite competetive in messaging space. Microsoft is the clear winner so far, followed closely by Google.

austenallred 9y ago
...Slack?
- ty_a 9y ago
  Unless there is a self hosted requirement.
ginko 9y ago
Why is MS trying their hardest to kill Skype, then?
- relaxitup 9y ago
  They are? Haven't they been pushing Skype for Business pretty hard, considering also that they have supplanted Communicator/Lync with it as well?
ice109 9y ago
what's the MS solution? shows that i've never worked in enterprise that i don't even know

austenallred 9y ago

Because messaging is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and because WhatsApp, Messenger and Slack now have platforms that almost anything and everything can be built on, producing ungodly amounts of money.

detaro 9y ago
Which one of those are really producing "ungodly amounts of money"? They have tons of users, but as far as I know WhatsApp and Messenger don't have much in the way of commercial integration to "build almost anything and everything" yet?
saosebastiao 9y ago
Is there any publicly available proof that WhatsApp, Messenger, or Slack are producing godly amounts of money? Because as far as I can tell: * WhatsApp only produced large amounts of money for the founders but never profited and was intentionally never priced for massive profits. * Messenger's monitization efforts have only been experimental so far, and those experiments have been lackluster from a revenue standpoint. * Slack's financials are private and their most recent revenue claims that I have found are two years old but only $30M which would still be substantially far away from the billion dollar range even if they were in the 99th percentile of growth rates for VC backed companies. In fact, industry estimates are that the market for messaging is growing but still <$10B. When compared to the sort of money that a single company makes from advertising on their search engine, some might say that messaging is still producing very normal human levels of money and nowhere near ungodly territory.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Butterfield has talked about Slack's revenue already being in the billions

m_ke 9y ago

Retention and engagement. https://www.statista.com/statistics/417780/mobile-messenger-app-retention/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/417780/mobile-messenger-...

hooluupig 9y ago

If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried several times to make a successful messaging platform but fails repeatedly(just like Google's messaging mess). If facebook move in WeChat's direction,it will be a huge threat to amazon.Please excuse for my bad English as i am not a native speaker.

subpixel 9y ago
Exactly this. WeChat is an example of what Amazon can possibly do that no other US company is remotely capable of. I was going to say I can imagine an app that combines FB Messenger, Yelp, Travelocity, OpenTable, GrubHub, and Uber. But WeChat already has all these things (either via companies they own or via partnerships). Amazon also has Prime, so they can offer millions of subscribers incentives to prime the AnyTime pump.
astebbin 9y ago
Can Facebook and other US tech companies move in WeChat's direction successfully, in the West? Why did WeChat take off as such an everything-application in China? Do the same necessary motivations and trends exist elsewhere? I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally - or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari. Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps. Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?