My latest descent into messaging hell came two weeks ago, when I saw a notification for a friend’s message pop up in the growing list of notifications on my Android phone. I reflexively tapped the button to clear the list — and then realized I didn’t remember which app the notification came from.
Was it a Twitter direct message? No. Facebook message? Nope. A Google Hangouts message? Hmm, that wasn’t it either.
And then I got distracted by something else, because smartphone life sometimes shaves my attention span down to seconds. A week later, I was in my SMS app and I realized I’d had an unread message — the one from my friend that I’d lost track of before.
Messaging mania
That led me to inventory the apps on my phone, besides email and text messaging, that somebody could use to ping me with a quick note. Let’s see… Facebook Messenger, Twitter (via direct messaging), Google’s Hangouts, WhatsApp, Skype, Slack, Evernote, Yelp.
(Yes, Yelp. The only message I’ve received there was from a Washington Post colleague seven or eight years ago. His observation after I’d added him to my friends list: “it’s not just you… EVERY site on the web is becoming a social networking portal.”)
As bad as eight messaging-capable apps seem, things could be worse. I could not be over 40 and therefore actually use Snapchat for interaction with friends.
And Google (GOOG) would now like to add messaging apps number nine and 10 to my collection.
Last week, it shipped Duo, a one-to-one video messaging app for Android and iOS—think FaceTime, but without the Apple exclusivity and with end-to-end encryption. Duo will soon be joined by a “smart messaging app” called Allo, which is to WhatsApp what Duo is to FaceTime: a catch-up effort.
Apple (AAPL), for its part, is adding enough interactive features — stickers! giant emoji! Handwriting! — into iOS 10’s version of Messages that Macworld called it an “overloaded attack on Snapchat.” And this week, Bloomberg reported that the iPhone maker has begun work on a video editing and sharing app.
But look, everybody’s trying to catch up here. When it works, messaging can tie your users to your app by making it the place where they hear from their friends.
And failing to take advantage of that opportunity might kill you. AOL’s neglect of AOL Instant Messenger — with its user profiles and a friends list, it could have become Facebook — ranks as one of the worst social-networking strategic blunders of all time.
(Yahoo Finance’s parent firm made a similar mistake with Yahoo Messenger.)
How to make email look good
Messaging apps, by virtue of being their own proprietary platforms, can innovate in ways that would be harder when other companies are involved. They can quickly add features like encrypt messages, which secures them while in transit and when stored on your device — something far easier to do in Facebook Messenger than in e-mail.