Comment by mscrivo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mscrivo | Hacker News Reader

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If I could point out the one big reason that BBM was very popular at one point was because of the little "D" and "R" on outgoing messages. "D" meant delivered and "R" meant read. That, along with the reliability and performance of the messaging service and the fact that you didn't have to have to pay for a messaging plan to send messages/images/video, made it really great. I know Google Hangouts now has the "read" feature, and I believe iMessage does as well, but WhatsApp does not.

Beyond that, it just had a very intuitive UI and just worked as you expected it to. They steadily added new features like groups, voice and video calling which increased its value over time, but unfortunately, the user base got crushed.

I'm looking forward to trying it out on my N4 ... my wife uses a blackberry Z10, so I have at least one person to use it with.

In WhastApp, there are two little checkboxes next to every message -- one indicates the message has been received by the server (which is actually very useful!), two indicates the message has been delivered to the client. Coupled with the "Last seen at <this-time>" indicator for each chat partner, it's a decent heuristic for read messages.

When I was in a long-distance relationship a couple of years ago and couldn't SMS internationally without re-mortgaging, we made heavy use of an Android app called Kik which also had this very useful feature. It had four indicators, if I remember correctly. "..." meant it was pending and you were having network/signal issues, "S" meant the Kik server had received it from your network, and the "D" and "R" were delivered and read.

I didn't know Google Hangouts had it. How does it display the read indicator? I find the interface a little... obtuse, to say the least!

As far as I know, on whatsapp, one checkmark on a message means delivered, two means read. It depends on the device of the recipient though. Works best with iOS and Android devices in my experience.

That's not correct actually. The second checkmark means its been delivered to the device, not necessarily read.

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