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 Messaging – it’s a group thing
Tuesday, 23rd August 2011
By
Joanna Ptolomey
Article:
Group messaging has certainly been one of the major news stories this year. Back in January 2011 I reported on LiveWire the trends from the Las Vegas Consumer show where mobilisation was one of the key trends. We were also starting to see the signs of the growth in group messaging mobile applications.
In March 2011 I was reporting about Beluga group messaging service designed to compete with the BlackBerry messaging platform. The added extra is the ability to create pods (groups) to interact and share, with the additional benefit of geolocation tagging and pictures.
In that same March LiveWire I reported that GroupMe messaging application was beginning to attract a great deal of interest. So much so that by May 2011 Jan Knight was reporting on LiveWire that GroupMe had won breakout digital trend award at SXSW.
Back in March I was suggesting we watch this space for further acquisitions and two days ago it was reported that GroupMe has now been acquired by Skype. Presumably they wish to enhance their group messaging services to an already large Skype user group.
Beluga was acquired by FaceBook months back, possibly to help with development of FaceBook Messenger mobile service. Google are also getting into group messaging with the huddle feature on Google Plus.
The group messaging stellar rise in popularity is definitely set to continue throughout 2011 and I won’t be surprised if we see some further acquisistions with products coming on stream quickly. This story will very much be a case of watch carefully because this side of the mobile market is set to soar into 2012.
By Joanna Ptolomey
Joanna is a freelance information consultant and analyst. She started her career in information as a clinical librarian in the NHS before moving to global consultancy group DTZ. Prior to working in the information sector Joanna was a project planning engineer in the construction industry for 10 years.
She hopes to help people use information for assessing risk, making decisions and in governance. She is particularly interested in inequalities issues such as accessibility, information literacy and the information divide especially in the healthcare sector. She is the author of a chapter 'Digital divide and accessibility' in Government Information Management in the 21st Century. She is also the author of the book Taking charge of your career: a guide for library and information professionals.
You can follow Joanna on Twitter.
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