4 ms·

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

by 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.
- mef 13y ago
  A good point, and LINE also reports around 50% of their revenue coming from in-game purchases, hinting at what the author sees in Kik's future. It will be interesting to see if Kik can replicate LINE's Japan successes in North America.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    The thing about LINE (and kakaotalk, etc), though, is that they do a pretty good job of keeping the focus sharply on the essential messaging/voip functionality, while still making it very easy to do the "other stuff." You can install LINE and very quickly start chatting with existing friends from your phone address-book, and if you don't want to play games or whatever, their existence doesn't get in your way. In this sense, LINE etc aren't so much like FB or other "giant ball of mud" social apps, and present a much bigger threat to whatsapp.
  - mattquiros 13y ago
    But it can also be that in-game purchases and stickers and other things are only successful value propositions for a given demographic.
- bmajz 13y ago
  The fundamental question here is whether the success of LINE and on a similar note, Kakao, can translate to other markets. We've already seen that WhatsApp and other messengers were much less popular in the US due to the ubiquity of free messaging. I wonder if there are other economic and possibly cultural factors that enabled those apps to succeed in their home markets but may be barriers in other places.
micheseco 13y ago
Totally agree on that! WhatsApp is a solution to a problem/need: simple and low-cost communication with other people. I believe people would get away from WhatsApp and move to another WhatsApp-like platform if WhatsApp was to introduce more complex functionalities that are far from the need it answers to.
e12e 13y ago
No, that's not really my take-away from this. The author knows that people only want to be able to communicate in one "app" with "everyone" for "free"[1]. But he purposefully downplays sms and xmpp in in favour of centrally controlled silo-style messaging stuff (you could of course argue that sms is a silo too, but at least it by definition allows (sometimes expensive) federation). For a while, xmpp was set to become this app, everyone on facebook, and everyone on google/gmail where on xmpp -- for me it was the first serious contender to sms. But neither facebook nor google/gmail wanted to federate, so while I could communicate with (almost) everyone I could sms via xmpp, it wasn't like that for most users (they used either facebook chat or gtalk). Now google is killing xmpp in favour of hangouts, basically saying apple users can use ichat and sms, android users can use hangouts and sms -- so the only way to tell your friend (as in any of your friends, using one app) you're late for a meeting is sms (still/again). Unless Google and Apple (owners of Android and iOS) get their shit together and accept that federated xmpp is actually pretty f*ing useful I see nothing but fragmentation in our near future. The only possible light in the end of the tunnel is the death of telecom and birth of datacom, with everyone moving to SIP (or equivalent) with cross-platform, cross-provider presence-notification, voice, video and text communication. In the mean time these toy technology companies can play with their stock value, but I really doubt (and really, really hope) none of them will "win", where winning means reaching the global status that PSTN/regular voice phone and sms has today. I think anyone that thinks differently need to wake up from their dream. [edit: forgot 1]: data transfer costs money, and will continue to cost money. But you won't be paying 20 cents to send a short message, you'll be paying by the gigabyte, as you should. With all income from voice and sms falling away, I'm not sure what will happen to gsm/lte style wireless prices, I'm guessing there'll be similar tiers as today: ridiculously expensive pay-as-you-go (20 cents a megabyte?) and whatever-people-will-pay monthly (flat-ish) charges (in Norway that'd be around 50USD/Month give-or-take).
- coob 13y ago
  I wonder what happened behind the scenes after Jobs announced that FaceTime was to be standardised.

by mef 13y ago

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.

mef 13y ago
A good point, and LINE also reports around 50% of their revenue coming from in-game purchases, hinting at what the author sees in Kik's future. It will be interesting to see if Kik can replicate LINE's Japan successes in North America.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  The thing about LINE (and kakaotalk, etc), though, is that they do a pretty good job of keeping the focus sharply on the essential messaging/voip functionality, while still making it very easy to do the "other stuff." You can install LINE and very quickly start chatting with existing friends from your phone address-book, and if you don't want to play games or whatever, their existence doesn't get in your way. In this sense, LINE etc aren't so much like FB or other "giant ball of mud" social apps, and present a much bigger threat to whatsapp.
- mattquiros 13y ago
  But it can also be that in-game purchases and stickers and other things are only successful value propositions for a given demographic.
bmajz 13y ago
The fundamental question here is whether the success of LINE and on a similar note, Kakao, can translate to other markets. We've already seen that WhatsApp and other messengers were much less popular in the US due to the ubiquity of free messaging. I wonder if there are other economic and possibly cultural factors that enabled those apps to succeed in their home markets but may be barriers in other places.

micheseco 13y ago

Totally agree on that! WhatsApp is a solution to a problem/need: simple and low-cost communication with other people. I believe people would get away from WhatsApp and move to another WhatsApp-like platform if WhatsApp was to introduce more complex functionalities that are far from the need it answers to.

e12e 13y ago

No, that's not really my take-away from this. The author knows that people only want to be able to communicate in one "app" with "everyone" for "free"[1]. But he purposefully downplays sms and xmpp in in favour of centrally controlled silo-style messaging stuff (you could of course argue that sms is a silo too, but at least it by definition allows (sometimes expensive) federation). For a while, xmpp was set to become this app, everyone on facebook, and everyone on google/gmail where on xmpp -- for me it was the first serious contender to sms. But neither facebook nor google/gmail wanted to federate, so while I could communicate with (almost) everyone I could sms via xmpp, it wasn't like that for most users (they used either facebook chat or gtalk). Now google is killing xmpp in favour of hangouts, basically saying apple users can use ichat and sms, android users can use hangouts and sms -- so the only way to tell your friend (as in any of your friends, using one app) you're late for a meeting is sms (still/again). Unless Google and Apple (owners of Android and iOS) get their shit together and accept that federated xmpp is actually pretty f*ing useful I see nothing but fragmentation in our near future. The only possible light in the end of the tunnel is the death of telecom and birth of datacom, with everyone moving to SIP (or equivalent) with cross-platform, cross-provider presence-notification, voice, video and text communication. In the mean time these toy technology companies can play with their stock value, but I really doubt (and really, really hope) none of them will "win", where winning means reaching the global status that PSTN/regular voice phone and sms has today. I think anyone that thinks differently need to wake up from their dream. [edit: forgot 1]: data transfer costs money, and will continue to cost money. But you won't be paying 20 cents to send a short message, you'll be paying by the gigabyte, as you should. With all income from voice and sms falling away, I'm not sure what will happen to gsm/lte style wireless prices, I'm guessing there'll be similar tiers as today: ridiculously expensive pay-as-you-go (20 cents a megabyte?) and whatever-people-will-pay monthly (flat-ish) charges (in Norway that'd be around 50USD/Month give-or-take).

coob 13y ago
I wonder what happened behind the scenes after Jobs announced that FaceTime was to be standardised.