Messangers: Game-Changers In Communication

How messaging is affecting user's behavior

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin

EMAIL COMPETES WITH MESSAGING FOR RELEVANCE

Here’s a small question for you: when was the last time you contacted someone by making a traditional phone call? It probably wasn’t recently. That’s because the continuing rise of messaging apps and services, like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat and iMessage, is changing the game when it comes to communication - with friends, family and even businesses and work colleagues. Meanwhile, social media is transforming the way many of us consume news, leaving the question: what relevance will traditional phone calls and email have in the foreseeable future?

SOME OF THE LEADING LIGHTS IN MESSAGING

In February 2016, WhatsApp announced that it had amassed a billion monthly active users. The following July, Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp, announced that Facebook Messenger had reached the same milestone. This makes Messenger and WhatsApp two of the most popular instant messaging apps worldwide, as indicated by Engadget. Other popular messaging services include WeChat, which has attracted 806 million monthly active users, and Apple’s iMessage – which by February 2016, was being used to send a peak of 200,000 messages per second.

For conducting various conversations, the appeal of using these apps is obvious. Common advantages include being able to not only instant message, but also share images and make voice and video calls. Furthermore, they are often free - which, combined with their availability on many different platforms, makes them attractive for use in chatting to a wide array of people without users having to fret about what type of devices they are using. Even iMessage, despite being limited to Apple platforms, allows free-of-charge chatting across over a billion active devices.