The social media era was about what we make public. Now, it’s about what we don’t. The race to own the next great back channel.
Instant messaging is the center of the internet. Everything else is a temporary distraction.
The case for this is strong: Every company that has ruled the internet in the last 20 years — even for a short period — has had a dominant instant messaging service. Aol Instant Messenger kept people's attention focused on the company that provided their internet. People came to Yahoo as a portal to the web; they stuck around for Messenger. Windows, at its peak, supported the largest messaging service in the world. Google's search dominance begat Gmail, which claimed a large swath of the messaging public with Google Talk. Facebook promised updates and pictures from our friends; eventually, our friends were there all the time, chatting, and we couldn't leave.
Great instant messaging services die slowly — all of the ones I mentioned above still exist in some form. But they rise quickly, and with great effect. And entering 2014, we're long overdue for the next one.
Which might explain why now, in a rare alignment, nearly every dominant internet service is either planning to create a new instant messaging service or significantly revamping what they already have. Facebook and Google are incumbents scrambling to hold on. Instagram is rumored to be working on an instant messaging service (rumors that I hear are true). There are also credible whispers that Twitter, which in a recent redesign experiment resurfaced its long-hidden Direct Message feature, is working on an enhanced private messaging service. A large-scale battle to own the best and biggest back channel — the likes of which we haven't seen since Yahoo, Aol, and Microsoft squared off — is under way. This time, it's happening on our phones.
Twitter: @ow / Via techcrunch.com
Facebook and Google are in positions of power here, and they're doing everything they can to preserve that. Google recently unified its instant messaging system under the "Hangouts" moniker, creating a single channel for instant messages, texting, voice, and video chat. Facebook has gradually undertaken to do the same thing, placing private messages, online chats and mobile messaging in one stream. Both products, which started a subordinate features — Google Talk to Gmail, Facebook chat to the News Feed — can now function as independent services, and have standalone apps. Both companies have also made multi-billion dollar runs at Snapchat.
We're not sure what Twitter and Instagram's instant messaging services will look like, but we can guess. Both will arrive in a world where a majority of users are mobile; a world in which instant messaging and texting are in more or less the same activity (from a technological standpoint, for example, Apple's iMessage has about as much in common with the ancient AIM as it does with SMS). And they will exist, probably, within the confines of the apps and services they're a part of.
Twitter's current back channel, the Direct Message function, is useful but has been sidelined for years, hidden deeper and deeper within Twitter's interfaces to the point that using it feels almost furtive. DMing is a little clumsy — messages are received like kicks passed under a noisy dinner table. The exact implementation of a Twitter instant messaging service is somewhat difficult to visualize, but spiritually, it's an undeniably interesting fit. The site's influential base of power users are logged into the site all day already, talking to one another, so there may as well be an open back channel; another one of the site's most common use cases, the "I mostly follow my friends and family" type of user, already treats the site like an IM service. Widening the spectrum of privacy settings on these conversation feels like a natural move.
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