I've never been a big Twitter-er, mostly because of the lack of privacy, I guess. Or texter, mostly because of the cost. But recently things have happened which made me take note of a bunch of recently new apps.
A bunch of friends started sending me things through Apple's iPhone's iMessage app. It's weird in that, you can select a bunch of people from your contacts and, if they don't have an iMessage account, it will MMS (?) or email them.
This doesn't work well because it doesn't tell me who belongs to each phone number (do you know all your friends' phone numbers?) and replying didn't work either, through email or SMS'ing by hand.
I also noticed that my daughters were doing the same thing. That is, they were group texting. Fortunately, we now have unlimited text messaging so I won't get sticker shock with the monthly bill.
But it made me wonder, isn't there something out there better for group chat? Is SMS really the lowest common denominator? The lingua franca? Yes, I know that SMS isn't that bad, that it's all the third world countries have and that even many people in the US are limited to what their clamshells can send and receive. But surely there is something between iMessage and SMS ???
It turns out that there's something better, but "no one" uses it. XMPP aka Jabber is what both Google Chat and Facebook chat use. It supports group chats and presence notification. "Presence" is where it tells your friends whether you're "away" or not.
The trouble is that, while XMPP is supposed to be "federated", that is, Google and Facebook users are supposed to be able to talk to each other, instead, both Google and Facebook have shut their doors to the other guys. I guess it turned out that they couldn't monetize an open chat protocol so they closed the gates to each other to create their own little "walled gardens".
Broadening our search further, we find more and more "walled gardens". The most popular chat applications out there, by subscriber base, are:
from here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-chat-messaging-apps/
Skype - 300 million
iMessage - 250 million
Facebook - >200 million
Viber - >200 million
WhatsApp - <200 million, $1/yr
Google Hangouts - <100 million
With the exception of Skype (and possibly Hangouts at this time), the others will down convert to SMS if necessary. One of the amazing things I notice is that WhatsApp got so many users despite charging for the service and despite not having an existing user base. While the others don't send ads yet, I guess the threat of sending them, or WhatsApp's features, were enough to get them users without having the gargantuan block of users that, for example, Apple and Facebook have. Hats off to WhatsApp and Viber for being able to compete in the same room as the big guys.
But here's my question: Why is SMS the lowest common denominator? When I receive an SMS, it doesn't say who it's from and it's a pain to reply to a group SMS. Some services like GroupMe create "conference rooms" for you to text in, but this is a hack over a primitive service that is, what? 20 years old?
Additionally, having SMS as a back-up hasn't prevented the fractured market that we have. That is, no one is emerging as the leader. If anything, the field is expanding as chat apps pop-up with unique features like splitting a dining bill or erasing a photo as soon as it's viewed.
Couldn't we go back to supporting XMPP? Then we could see who sent a chat message, we'd have presence notifications, we could send large messages and could do group chat without resorting to MMS.
Hey, big guys, what would be the harm? Is SMS supposed to be painful so that we'll all create an account on your service that we don't want to have anything to do with?
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