Recently, Facebook launched their first app that wasn’t just Facebook, but a stand alone messaging app. Now what this means for Facebook itself is up for debate. Whether this is them testing the water before pushing out a photo only app or simply coming back at the fact that Google+ has the Huddle feature; whatever they are doing is just fine. My thoughts about the app don’t so much concern Facebook as they do the state of mobile and computer based messaging.
The current state of messaging is becoming a bit messy and it needs to be fixed, it needs a savior. We all remember using messaging services over the web; AIM, Yahoo, and MSN were the big names in this game, you always had some friends in each which meant having multiple accounts. Trillian came along to push these three into one, giving you the one spot access to multiple accounts. These services were only available when you were at your computer, hooked in to the world wide web.
It wasn’t long until mobile phones became main stream. Slowly but surely everyone had one and that brought SMS or Short Messaging Service. At this point I am sure we have all used SMS in our lives,it’s probably one of your main forms of communication. Although most of the kinks have been worked out with SMS, by far the biggest drawback is the fact that you have to pay for every message sent and with most carriers every message received as well. This is a cost that the carriers have taken advantage of, by charging for a much higher than needed amout per message, and by doing this forcing you into a plan that gives you a certain amount of messages per month. It has become standard now to just pay for some tier of messaging plan, although now those options seem to be becoming even more limited as AT&T is going to limit it to either unlimited or nothing plans.
The world needs a change, mobile data is so standard that there is no reason we should be paying extra to send messages that are data already. The thing is, there are many ways around using SMS. BlackBerry was one of the first people to try and do this with their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) by building an instant messaging service into your phone. Now both Apple and Google are taking a stab at a similar service with iMessage and Huddle respectively. There are many other SMS replacement apps out there for all varieties of phones, the most recent of these being the Facebook one. Even Samsung is now trying to get in the game with a soon launching messaging service that is suppose to be available on iOS and Android.
While all these apps work great there is a major problem with all of them; they are not the standard and they do not come built in to all phones sold. Every mobile phone sold right now has the ability to use SMS, regardless of whether you choice to opt in and pay for a plan, or you just pay for it as you use it, it is there. None of these other services can say that, and that is why SMS still has its hold on the mobile market, and why carriers can charge inflated rates however they see fit. The Facebook Messenger app has the best chance right now because it has the largest user base built in from the start and is on at least the two biggest holders of the market share (Android and iOS), but you still have to go out and download it, so the problem remains.
We need a messaging savior, a service that becomes the standard and comes with every phone, on every carrier, that simply runs through data. Someone needs to find a way to create a service that gets everyone on it right away, or one app to use all of the others interchangeable, it is the only way to get around SMS. Until this happens we are stuck getting charged an inflated rate for a service we can easily circumvent with data.
For now I plan to take it upon myself to find the best of these services, for the next couple months I am going to try and stop using SMS all together and just use data to communicate.
