messaging

LINK: “Chat is Google’s next big fix for Android’s messaging mess”

A top-tier Android phone can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, and for that money, you’ll get some amazing features. It will have a stellar screen, top-flight camera, gobs of storage, and an absolutely atrocious texting experience.

Original: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/4/19/17252486/google-android-messages-chat-rcs-anil-sabharwal-imessage-texting?__twitter_impression=true

Bits and bobs for Thursday 29 January 2015

bitsboba

An occasional effort to link to interesting things I have seen. Not convinced about the format yet – let me know what you think.

  • One of my current obsessions is around mobile messaging apps. This interview with the CEO of Kik helps explains why this space is so exciting.
  • Slack has bought a company that does screensharing and voice chat to add to its text based workplace group chat thing. Makes Slack potentially more attractive to those looking for something approaching an all in one internal comms thing. For me though, it doesn’t move the workplace tech conversation on far enough.
  • A post about the future of Medium – published on Medium, of course. I really can’t personally figure out if Medium is incredibly interesting or just really boring. Could go either way – and the crunch will be when it begins to try and create revenue, I suspect.
  • A nice example from Simon Wardley on how to use his value chain mapping method.
  • Tumblr is rolling out new tools in its editor to help people use it to write longer form articles – a bit like Medium. Interesting, but one cannot help but wonder whether this goes against what made Tumblr popular with the people it’s popular with – i.e. quick sharing of memes, videos and so on. Is this Yahoo! starting to fiddle with its marquee purchase?

Simple private mobile communities with Glassboard

gbGlassboard is a neat cross platform (iOS, Android, Web) app that helps people to communicate within teams while on the move.

You download the app – or use the web version – and create a ‘board’ which is where you post messages and files. Then you invite people to join that board, and only they and you have access to what is posted there.

Even better, you can choose to have people join by using an invite code rather than receiving a specific invite. This means that, for example, you could create a board for all the members of an email newsletter to join to be able to chat. Just include the invite code in the email, and all those who you want to have access can do so.

It works really nicely on smartphones – the web interface is a bit clunky, but then, it’s made for mobile I think. It also is a nice, more lightweight alternative to a Yammer network, which can sometimes feel like taking a sledgehammer to a nut, I find, when all you want to do is have a quick chat now and again with a group.

Glassboard is free for 3 boards. For unlimited boards and a few other features, you can go premium for a very reasonable $5 per month.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Snapchat, WhatsApp and the rise of anti-social networking

Apparently, private messaging service WhatsApp has overtaken Facebook messaging as the goto mobile messaging platform.

I can understand why growing numbers of people are picking up on private messaging services like WhatsApp, SnapChat and so on – particularly young people.

These apps allow users to send each other messages, whether text, images or video, privately. It can be within groups, so there is a social element, but it’s also private in that this isn’t taking place in the open.

Snapchat is a particularly interesting example because of its key feature – that messages and media self destruct after a certain time period.

After all, young people are facing the possibility of having their every move for the rest of their lives documented publicly online, for everyone to see, including parents, future employers and so on. Having some of that stuff private, and wiped from the record, must be attractive.

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