12 ms·

After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View on What’s Next in Messaging

77 points by nikunjk 13y ago

asharpe 13y ago
Identity (online and offline) is ultimately what this entire market (and product space) is about. 100 years ago, all you had was a street address. Then came telegrams (but often the last mile was still your street address. For the last 50 years, you added a telephone number. Then Fax/Telex. What the last 20 years (or so) has seen is the complete disruption of these channels. Email is an entirely new medium giving you a unique new address and mobile phones allowed you to personalise a phone number (rather than call someone's home and hope not to speak to partner/child/parent). And then came Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter). All of a sudden, you don't need to tell someone you want to have a relationship with (in the broadest sense of the word) you address, phone number, etc. Just your Facebook profile. This is a seismic shift in our communication. In each of these cases, you have a unique identity that people can reach you on. As the author points out, to whom and how much you want to publicise that identity is based on the reach and likelihood for abuse. However, it's a new identity. Why WhatsApp and kik (and others) have value is they are the registry of these new identities. These identities are used not only to interact or communicate, they are increasingly becoming the hub of all online interactions: taxi fares, online commerce, sharing other forms of media. EBay started us down this journey where as a seller you can provide as much or as little information as you like. Ultimately, to own the registry is to own the identities and access to them. This is very powerful and why you need to keep inventing and re-inventing the platform to retain and acquire new identities. That there were a billion WhatsApp users out there that may never need to login to Facebook again is a massive strategic threat to Facebook - hence the valuation and hence why messaging or identity is tremendously valuable.
- bmajz 13y ago
  Spot on. Facebook has become quite valuable as a semi-reliable identity source and WhatsApp definitely enhances that service by consolidating and extending it.
rakoo 13y ago
Seriously, not even considering XMPP, the foundation of it all, with the immense advantage of interoperability is sad. There are coutless softwares, pretty much everyone already has an account, and yet ... Would we even consider an email where we have to be on the same network to communicate ? No. Would we even consider an IM where we have to be on the same network to communicate ? Where we can't even use our computers ? Hell yeah !
- d0vs 13y ago
  People care about products, not protocols.
  - 01Michael10 13y ago
    I want an IM messaging product where I can communicate with almost anyone...
    - hayksaakian 13y ago
      SMS solves that problem for people who have that specific problem.
      - 01Michael10 13y ago
        Wrong, you should have read the article to understand the advantages and disadvantages of SMS and messaging. Disadvantages of SMS is that it is tied to a phone number (no privacy) and is expensive in most of the world. These are not issues with messaging but it does suffer from not having a standard protocol that everyone can use like SMS. SMS is stuck where it is at now but it's certainly possible for messaging to be much more then it is now.
        unsignedint 13y ago
        There are another aspects that SMS is bad at: - Crossing a border with SMS is rather expensive. Only recently that T-mobile finally dropping 35 cents charge for international SMSes, not sure about others... - UTF-8 implementation sucked until recently. I think it is still unpredictable if it cross carrier. - Group SMS is non-existant, although MMS can handles it. (and if you have someone uses sonething like Google Voice, forget group messaging... although it is probably Google Voice who would deserve some blames.) But there is no way to get receipients' capabilities.
mef 13y ago
The author's thrust seems to be that eventually, mobile users will want more than "just messaging" from their messaging app: they'll want a "platform" on which they can play games with their contacts and shop for things. This might be true, but the history of telephone, SMS, email, and desktop messaging suggests otherwise. People don't seem to want a multi-faceted "platform", they simply want to communicate with other people.
- Spittie 13y ago
  This is exactly why Whatsapp got so popular. It's just MMS with few improvements (better image/video/sound quality) and at no price (well, 0.99€/year now, but it used to be free for most of its life). It even has the same very low barrier to entry - You don't need to explicitly add contacts, it takes everything directly from your address book, which is likely already full of your friends/people you know. Hell, you don't even need to create a new account, it validate automatically your phone number with an sms. While this is awful privacy-wise, and kill the possibility of an easy-to-setup desktop client, it makes everything really easy for everyone, especially those that use their smarthphones for most of their online tasks (which seems to be a big group growing every year). Nothing more, nothing less.
  - MetaCosm 13y ago
    Wasn't their slogan even at one point basically "like a dial tone"? Hinting at simplicity and reliability.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  I think he jumped the shark[0] at > Want to shop for shoes with your friends now? No, I definitely don't want to go shoe shopping with my friends in an SMS app. 0: http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sha...
- minikomi 13y ago
  This is, essentially, the position of LINE in japan. Started as a funky messaging app with stickers, became a host for many pay to play games & fortune telling etc.
kayoone 13y ago
I am not sure. Basically many people move away from platforms (like facebook) to more specific apps for simple tasks like messaging (WhatsApp) or photosharing(Instagram/snapchat). This suggests that the whole circle will now start over again ? I hope not ;)
medell 13y ago
His point about country usage patterns even applies to the US and Canada. I remember in Canada when most of my friends were on ICQ (and the ubiquitious "uh oh!") and then the slow switch to MSN. Yet the majority of my American friends used AOL Instant Messenger. For the younger folk that have never heard the default ICQ notification sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8
- 01Michael10 13y ago
  ICQ - Now that is old school and I remember the notification sound so well. I had to go look them up and they still exist! LOL They are also on almost every mobile platform --> http://www.icq.com/download/mobile/en http://www.icq.com/download/mobile/en They even have over 150,000 reviews on Google Play. Most of the reviews are non-English or people where English is not their native language so that explains why I have never heard of anyone using ICQ on their phone.
weixiyen 13y ago
I honestly think that if a messenger app wins, it will be more valuable than Facebook, and its not even close. Facebook at its core is really only about 2 things: 1) Identity 2) Photos But if a messenger wins, it will actually take over 1) Identity, and can potentially take over 2) Photos. This is because Messenger Apps has way more reach in terms of devices. If most people in the world use one service, or most people in the country use a service, this service can now become a platform for all sorts of things, but most importantly, in terms of monetization, it can be a platform for purchasing goods and services. Never in the history of this planet has there been anything like the Mobile Phone. Something everyone in the world could potentially have, and there is a chance that there can be a single service that almost everyone in the world uses. The author seems to be in his own personal bubble though. He lists Line, Kakao, WeChat, Kik as the only potential messengers that can become the biggest messaging platform. I don't believe this is true. It's possible for new entrants and even Facebook to win. It may also be that messaging stays fragmented in its current state without a unifying messenger for the entire world, with each messenger being ubiquitous to a country or region.
- corry 13y ago
  I wouldn't say he's in his own bubble. Each of those companies has a good head start of 100's of millions of DAILY ACTIVE users + apps that actually are great at what they do. Could Facebook still enter? Sure, but they've bought a few other messaging apps and done basically nothing with them. Could a fresher startup come in? Sure, you can never discount that. But the listed messaging apps are (a) not a zero sum game / mutually exclusive, and (b) already have a huge head start.
  - kawera 13y ago
    (a) not a zero sum game / mutually exclusive This is a very important aspect. Like many others, I have friends using different messaging apps and it costs me almost nothing to have all of then running alongside each other.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Facebook's Messenger for Android is pretty good and when I write messages with it, people reply. This is why I think the Whatsapp acquisition makes no sense, unless it was a defensive move.
corry 13y ago
Great article, Ted. It's a pattern we've all seen before - whoever nails the core utility / experience (Google->search, FB->friending) gets to build a massive platform around it. And messaging is clearly at the core (if not THE core) of the smartphone.
w1ntermute 13y ago
> As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S. This is quite misleading when smartphone messengers aren't popular in the US.
cft 13y ago
The purpose of this piece is very simple: dang, WhatsApp was just bought for 19bn, someone please buy Kik, we are also a mobile instant messenger! Problem is, it does not work that way: you cannot argue that if Kik has 10% of WhatsApp's number of users it should be bought for 1.9bn: social networking/messaging is sort of winner takes it all game.
- kevando 13y ago
  I agree this is mostly a PR article, but it does remind me that I often think only in terms of the USA. When the world adds 1bn new smart phone users, it's going to be an INCREDIBLE improvement to their life and before the first thing they'll do is figure out how to message their friends. Messaging will be THE first thing all new smart phone users do. If it's not SMS, what is it?
  - bmajz 13y ago
    Yeah, I think this is at the base of US-centric folks' surprise at the WhatsApp deal. The difficulties in messaging simply aren't apparent when you get it free on almost every plan. Additionally, there is the extremely useful case of international messaging which is more apparent in places where you have smaller countries with lots of movement between them e.g. Europe or the Middle East. Just not a big a need in the US and thus hard to see value
davemel37 13y ago
I honestly knew very little about this space, but now that I understand the difference. The winner is clear. Focus is the secret to branding and what's app is the only one with a clear singular focus... Categories don't converge. They diverge. That's just how evolution works. Plus, the human mind associates convergence as compromise. The likely outcome of this battle will be that people will assume what's app focus means they are better at messaging and everyone else's apps short of bringing a new level of convenience we are willing to compromise for, will be perceived as second class. After all,how can someone doing two things be better at something than someone who specilizes in it exclusively?
- chacham15 13y ago
  > After all,how can someone doing two things be better at something than someone who specilizes in it exclusively? There are many reasons why this is possible. For example: why are RISC CPUs dominating CISC CPUs? While this comparison is slightly unfair because you want to compare a general purpose CPU to an ASIC, it illustrates a case where trying to have an instruction focus on doing one thing well is worse than having multiple instructions try and do it.
  - davemel37 13y ago
    I'm talking about how human perception works. We assume a specialist knows more than a generalist. Same goes for branding, we assume a specialized product works better than an all in one product.
gbog 13y ago
I can share my experience as a wechat user: yes it is a platform, yes people want and need much more than sms. In fact it is very easy to imagine a wechat phone that will fulfill the needs of users. And it is extremely dangerous: this platform is a prison! This can kill internet.

77 points by nikunjk 13y ago

Identity (online and offline) is ultimately what this entire market (and product space) is about. 100 years ago, all you had was a street address. Then came telegrams (but often the last mile was still your street address. For the last 50 years, you added a telephone number. Then Fax/Telex. What the last 20 years (or so) has seen is the complete disruption of these channels. Email is an entirely new medium giving you a unique new address and mobile phones allowed you to personalise a phone number (rather than call someone's home and hope not to speak to partner/child/parent). And then came Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter). All of a sudden, you don't need to tell someone you want to have a relationship with (in the broadest sense of the word) you address, phone number, etc. Just your Facebook profile. This is a seismic shift in our communication. In each of these cases, you have a unique identity that people can reach you on. As the author points out, to whom and how much you want to publicise that identity is based on the reach and likelihood for abuse. However, it's a new identity. Why WhatsApp and kik (and others) have value is they are the registry of these new identities. These identities are used not only to interact or communicate, they are increasingly becoming the hub of all online interactions: taxi fares, online commerce, sharing other forms of media. EBay started us down this journey where as a seller you can provide as much or as little information as you like. Ultimately, to own the registry is to own the identities and access to them. This is very powerful and why you need to keep inventing and re-inventing the platform to retain and acquire new identities. That there were a billion WhatsApp users out there that may never need to login to Facebook again is a massive strategic threat to Facebook - hence the valuation and hence why messaging or identity is tremendously valuable.

bmajz 13y ago
Spot on. Facebook has become quite valuable as a semi-reliable identity source and WhatsApp definitely enhances that service by consolidating and extending it.

rakoo 13y ago

Seriously, not even considering XMPP, the foundation of it all, with the immense advantage of interoperability is sad. There are coutless softwares, pretty much everyone already has an account, and yet ... Would we even consider an email where we have to be on the same network to communicate ? No. Would we even consider an IM where we have to be on the same network to communicate ? Where we can't even use our computers ? Hell yeah !

d0vs 13y ago
People care about products, not protocols.
- 01Michael10 13y ago
  I want an IM messaging product where I can communicate with almost anyone...
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    SMS solves that problem for people who have that specific problem.
    - 01Michael10 13y ago
      Wrong, you should have read the article to understand the advantages and disadvantages of SMS and messaging. Disadvantages of SMS is that it is tied to a phone number (no privacy) and is expensive in most of the world. These are not issues with messaging but it does suffer from not having a standard protocol that everyone can use like SMS. SMS is stuck where it is at now but it's certainly possible for messaging to be much more then it is now.
      - unsignedint 13y ago
        There are another aspects that SMS is bad at: - Crossing a border with SMS is rather expensive. Only recently that T-mobile finally dropping 35 cents charge for international SMSes, not sure about others... - UTF-8 implementation sucked until recently. I think it is still unpredictable if it cross carrier. - Group SMS is non-existant, although MMS can handles it. (and if you have someone uses sonething like Google Voice, forget group messaging... although it is probably Google Voice who would deserve some blames.) But there is no way to get receipients' capabilities.

mef 13y ago

The author's thrust seems to be that eventually, mobile users will want more than "just messaging" from their messaging app: they'll want a "platform" on which they can play games with their contacts and shop for things. This might be true, but the history of telephone, SMS, email, and desktop messaging suggests otherwise. People don't seem to want a multi-faceted "platform", they simply want to communicate with other people.

Spittie 13y ago
This is exactly why Whatsapp got so popular. It's just MMS with few improvements (better image/video/sound quality) and at no price (well, 0.99€/year now, but it used to be free for most of its life). It even has the same very low barrier to entry - You don't need to explicitly add contacts, it takes everything directly from your address book, which is likely already full of your friends/people you know. Hell, you don't even need to create a new account, it validate automatically your phone number with an sms. While this is awful privacy-wise, and kill the possibility of an easy-to-setup desktop client, it makes everything really easy for everyone, especially those that use their smarthphones for most of their online tasks (which seems to be a big group growing every year). Nothing more, nothing less.
- MetaCosm 13y ago
  Wasn't their slogan even at one point basically "like a dial tone"? Hinting at simplicity and reliability.
w1ntermute 13y ago
I think he jumped the shark[0] at > Want to shop for shoes with your friends now? No, I definitely don't want to go shoe shopping with my friends in an SMS app. 0: http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sha...
minikomi 13y ago
This is, essentially, the position of LINE in japan. Started as a funky messaging app with stickers, became a host for many pay to play games & fortune telling etc.

kayoone 13y ago

I am not sure. Basically many people move away from platforms (like facebook) to more specific apps for simple tasks like messaging (WhatsApp) or photosharing(Instagram/snapchat). This suggests that the whole circle will now start over again ? I hope not ;)

medell 13y ago

His point about country usage patterns even applies to the US and Canada. I remember in Canada when most of my friends were on ICQ (and the ubiquitious "uh oh!") and then the slow switch to MSN. Yet the majority of my American friends used AOL Instant Messenger. For the younger folk that have never heard the default ICQ notification sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8

01Michael10 13y ago
ICQ - Now that is old school and I remember the notification sound so well. I had to go look them up and they still exist! LOL They are also on almost every mobile platform --> http://www.icq.com/download/mobile/en http://www.icq.com/download/mobile/en They even have over 150,000 reviews on Google Play. Most of the reviews are non-English or people where English is not their native language so that explains why I have never heard of anyone using ICQ on their phone.

weixiyen 13y ago

I honestly think that if a messenger app wins, it will be more valuable than Facebook, and its not even close. Facebook at its core is really only about 2 things: 1) Identity 2) Photos But if a messenger wins, it will actually take over 1) Identity, and can potentially take over 2) Photos. This is because Messenger Apps has way more reach in terms of devices. If most people in the world use one service, or most people in the country use a service, this service can now become a platform for all sorts of things, but most importantly, in terms of monetization, it can be a platform for purchasing goods and services. Never in the history of this planet has there been anything like the Mobile Phone. Something everyone in the world could potentially have, and there is a chance that there can be a single service that almost everyone in the world uses. The author seems to be in his own personal bubble though. He lists Line, Kakao, WeChat, Kik as the only potential messengers that can become the biggest messaging platform. I don't believe this is true. It's possible for new entrants and even Facebook to win. It may also be that messaging stays fragmented in its current state without a unifying messenger for the entire world, with each messenger being ubiquitous to a country or region.

corry 13y ago
I wouldn't say he's in his own bubble. Each of those companies has a good head start of 100's of millions of DAILY ACTIVE users + apps that actually are great at what they do. Could Facebook still enter? Sure, but they've bought a few other messaging apps and done basically nothing with them. Could a fresher startup come in? Sure, you can never discount that. But the listed messaging apps are (a) not a zero sum game / mutually exclusive, and (b) already have a huge head start.
- kawera 13y ago
  (a) not a zero sum game / mutually exclusive This is a very important aspect. Like many others, I have friends using different messaging apps and it costs me almost nothing to have all of then running alongside each other.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Facebook's Messenger for Android is pretty good and when I write messages with it, people reply. This is why I think the Whatsapp acquisition makes no sense, unless it was a defensive move.

corry 13y ago

Great article, Ted. It's a pattern we've all seen before - whoever nails the core utility / experience (Google->search, FB->friending) gets to build a massive platform around it. And messaging is clearly at the core (if not THE core) of the smartphone.

w1ntermute 13y ago

> As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S. This is quite misleading when smartphone messengers aren't popular in the US.

cft 13y ago

The purpose of this piece is very simple: dang, WhatsApp was just bought for 19bn, someone please buy Kik, we are also a mobile instant messenger! Problem is, it does not work that way: you cannot argue that if Kik has 10% of WhatsApp's number of users it should be bought for 1.9bn: social networking/messaging is sort of winner takes it all game.

kevando 13y ago
I agree this is mostly a PR article, but it does remind me that I often think only in terms of the USA. When the world adds 1bn new smart phone users, it's going to be an INCREDIBLE improvement to their life and before the first thing they'll do is figure out how to message their friends. Messaging will be THE first thing all new smart phone users do. If it's not SMS, what is it?
- bmajz 13y ago
  Yeah, I think this is at the base of US-centric folks' surprise at the WhatsApp deal. The difficulties in messaging simply aren't apparent when you get it free on almost every plan. Additionally, there is the extremely useful case of international messaging which is more apparent in places where you have smaller countries with lots of movement between them e.g. Europe or the Middle East. Just not a big a need in the US and thus hard to see value

davemel37 13y ago

I honestly knew very little about this space, but now that I understand the difference. The winner is clear. Focus is the secret to branding and what's app is the only one with a clear singular focus... Categories don't converge. They diverge. That's just how evolution works. Plus, the human mind associates convergence as compromise. The likely outcome of this battle will be that people will assume what's app focus means they are better at messaging and everyone else's apps short of bringing a new level of convenience we are willing to compromise for, will be perceived as second class. After all,how can someone doing two things be better at something than someone who specilizes in it exclusively?

chacham15 13y ago
> After all,how can someone doing two things be better at something than someone who specilizes in it exclusively? There are many reasons why this is possible. For example: why are RISC CPUs dominating CISC CPUs? While this comparison is slightly unfair because you want to compare a general purpose CPU to an ASIC, it illustrates a case where trying to have an instruction focus on doing one thing well is worse than having multiple instructions try and do it.
- davemel37 13y ago
  I'm talking about how human perception works. We assume a specialist knows more than a generalist. Same goes for branding, we assume a specialized product works better than an all in one product.

gbog 13y ago

I can share my experience as a wechat user: yes it is a platform, yes people want and need much more than sms. In fact it is very easy to imagine a wechat phone that will fulfill the needs of users. And it is extremely dangerous: this platform is a prison! This can kill internet.