Group Messaging
A student submission by Nader Dergham (in its entirety - no changes)
To better understand group messaging and why it has become the highlight of the south by southwest (SXSW) conference we need to know what it was and what it is advancing into. Facebook tried to address the craze of group messaging through the status update which probably ends up being read by your mother or high school classmate. The group post also didn’t work since facebook groups proved themselves to be too static for group communication. Next we had twitter who allowed to either send updates to all who follow your profile or a single friend, leaving us back to group texting stone age.
What really makes group messaging the talk of the tech world is the sudden stream of group messaging applications such as yobongo, groupme, beluga and fast society that are now being featured in tech conventions such as SXSW. The next question should be “well why are they focusing on such applications?” and the answer is simple, it is because of the mass adoption of the smart phone (iPhone, Andriod and blackberry), which is capable of running such applications.
Groupme’s co-founder discusses in an interview that applications like his run mostly through 2 mediums. First one is wireless connections that are given through service provided such as AT&T, but these services tend to get jammed and cause the application to lag, and so the solution to that would be to drop all “data use” and jump to what he calls the lowest common denominator of all phones, the SMS, to get updated notice delivered to their phones immediatly. Application developers have made their software’s capable of integrating themselves with other applications; here is an example of how group messaging frontline innovation is working.
You can access your family group on your groupme application from your iPhone and use foursquare a very popular location based social network service, that uses GPS, has exploded with popularity because its success at the 2009 SXSW convention. From there it will show all the group members that are at the same location and send the message in a matter of seconds. Such dynamic communication is thought to be of the future, and big names in social networking like facebook are doing their best to try to get a piece of the action by acquiring start ups like beluga. Beluga, which is thought to be the next big app is differentiating its service from those of groupme by being available to not only smart phone users but also by other features phones by send the information such as text and pictures through SMS instead of app-form. The future of group communication will extend to videos and sound clips and that’s not all. Let’s say that you and your friends want to create a group for an event, the new app will be able to look at your events in facebook and create a pod by itself and automatically invite you and your friends. All these applications are said to be for free except for the charge for the SMS which is provided by your service provider.
Though not everybody is cheering for this sort of technology, applications that open up chat rooms according to your location are being critiqued as a nuisances and an invasion of privacy. Above all, are all these means of communication at the expense of quality of communication? And are we loosing the emotion that is attached to communication? These are all question that will most definitely be come across by users of such applications and it will be left to them to decide whether or not all these means of communication are helping us at all to communicate.
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