After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View on What’s Next in Messaging
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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).
> 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-sha...
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.
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.
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 !
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.
- 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.
In Europe we have pre-paid packages with flat rate SMS.
Other than some carriers offering extra international SMS options, it's certainly not is a standard.
I am not very sure about how it really works in Europe, but I have feeling that EU countries have more comprehensive arrangements for calling/texting/roaming across their borders, or at least I wouldn't be too surprising even if so.
The option depends per operator.
No phone number, email, or username required to connect with anyone, anywhere.
Oh and XMPP on featurephones already exist: see http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/
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.
This is quite misleading when smartphone messengers aren't popular in the US.
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.
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.
First of all, if it wasn't for the aquisition I wouldn't even be aware Whatsapp exists, as none of my friends uses it.
Second, a messaging application used to be a standard exercise to be done during network programming classes in my CS degree, so no big technical challenge to solve.
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.
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
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.
And messaging is clearly at the core (if not THE core) of the smartphone.
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?
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.