Although it has been in existence since 2013, it gained new prominence in January 2021 when WhatsApp updated its terms of service to parent company Facebook and other subsidiaries to collect user data including phone numbers and locations. To keep its popularity, WhatsApp also steadily introduced new features such as voice messages in 2013.Īnother IM app that has grown in popularity in recent years is Telegram. It attained over 400 million users across the world by 2014 and was acquired by Facebook.
#INSTANT MESSAGING FREE#
Whatapps was launched in 2009, just as many users were switching over to smartphones and discovering that, by adopting WhatsApp, they were no longer limited by the number of free SMSes bundled by their telco. In China, WeChat is what people are using. Which you use probably depends on which service is the most popular in your country.
Today, the vast majority of texting happens over chat apps. While some would die off, others became increasingly sophisticated, with the ability to attach photos and videos. Over the years, platforms such as MySpace and Facebook launched their own messaging services, giving users even more choices to instantly get in touch with their contacts. The second half of the 2000s was when social media started taking off as a phenomenon. This laid the foundation for the mobile instant messaging experience that we are all familiar with today. Although texting had already been ongoing for years, BBM had several advantages such as not being limited to 160 characters per message, having “delivered” and “read” receipts, and group chats. Mobile phones truly became an instant messaging vehicle when BBM was introduced to Blackberry devices in 2005. The word emoji itself is derived from the Japanese characters 絵 (“e:, picture), 文 (“mo”, write) and 字 (“ji”, character). The first emojis fit into a 12 by 12 pixel grid and were a Japanese invention. Other popular instant messaging programmes hit the market over the next decade, including ICQ in 1996 (which is still alive!), Yahoo Messenger in 1998, and MSN Messenger in 1999.Įmojis were also first introduced in 1999, enabling people to communicate online beyond simply using text.
Created in 1988, it spread globally by 1989, with real-time online conversations – a major innovation for its time – taking place in so-called “chat rooms”. Older millennials are the first to use the internet before adulthood and will no doubt fondly remember the first publicly available instant messenger – Internet Relay Chat, better known by the initials IRC. In Singapore, SMS peaked in popularity in 2011, before seeing a steady decline as smartphones became increasingly adopted. The use of SMS grew strongly over the next twenty years, with millennials becoming adept at tapping out messages on the 3 X 4 numeric keyboard. In 1992, the first SMS was sent and once again, it was a banal “Merry Christmas”. Reading text on your phone did not become a thing until almost two decades later. Such a momentous occasion was unfortunately not marked by momentous words, with the conversation reportedly being mostly pleasantries and checking whether the sound quality was good. Remember the time when phones were just for voice calls? The first mobile phone call was made in 1973, heralding a new wave of communication. We take a look at how instant messaging has evolved across the years. Yet SMS was seen as a revolutionary change from voice calls at one point of time.Īnd instant messaging itself has seen various shifts in how we communicate: from plain texts to winks, voice messages to stickers. And the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) – similar to today’s iMessage – service ruled the roost in corporate boardrooms.īBM, as the first instant messenger for mobile phones, was at then deemed superior to the delayed and expensive SMS service. The devices with physical qwerty keyboards were once the staple of white-collar professionals and even former US president Barack Obama couldn’t put his down.
Once so popular and addictive that it was nicknamed the Crackberry, Blackberry pulled the plug on its smartphones in January 2022. If we want to talk about instant messaging, we have got to mention Blackberry.
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