Lately, chat services like KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat and others are in a battle for attention from customers, with the hopes that they will download and use their apps. Some companies have spent quite a bit of money to appoint celebrities as brand ambassadors and place TV ads during prime time. Various features have been developed and promotions executed – even features like stickers have been imitated by apps that formerly did not even have chat, like Path.
Communicating through short messages is certainly not new, because since the dawn of the Internet, there have been platforms like mIRC and the still-popular Yahoo! Messenger (which somehow has not made any significant advancements in mobile messaging). Yahoo! Messenger was the first to have something similar to stickers, which is Yahoo! Audibles, which I think is slightly more interesting as it combines animation and sound (which, naturally, may be too bandwidth-intensive for distribution through cellular networks).
There was also MSN Messenger (since deprecated) and GoogleTalk (which has recently transformed to Hangouts). Perhaps since these chat services initially grew as web-based services, their mobile chat apps were more of a complement than part of a strategy.
Even Apple ‘caved’ by creating its own chat platform, iMessage, which has a pretty good multi-device concept, but is exclusive to Apple users and practically has not evolved since its first iteration. The dinosaur in the room, BlackBerry, the popularity of which was helped by the BlackBerry Messenger service, recently announced that the BBM service will become cross-platform.
One of the reasons social media grew so large in Indonesia was – take note! – that Indonesians love to gossip. Inane discussions about friends and or celebrities is another form of entertainment, to the point that many high-rating shows on TVs provide this kind of information. Oh right, they’re called infotainment. Okay.
Regardless of the positive or negative aspect of the habit, context or content, media for self-expression and telling stories to each other is the craze in Indonesia. Jumping to the chat app era, chat becomes a new entertainment medium. Sharing stories, gossip, jokes; and if something cannot be said in words (or difficult to), the stickers are used. If possible, all chat applications remain active on the phone – from Yahoo! Messenger to the latest app.
From a technological perspective, the growth of these chat services are caused by many things – the sheer variety of smartphones in the market has led the consumers to find one service that can be used on all smartphone platforms, so they can keep chatting, and avoid using SMS which still ‘feels’ like eating up your phone credit (and by using “unlimited” mobile data services within the allocated quota).
Visually and interactively, these chat apps were made to be attractive to use, unlike the previous chat services whose mobile apps only seem to be a ‘shadow’ of their web roots. Of course, the games developed by the chat app developers (I was at one point addicted to LINE Pop) made people keep using the app – somewhat similar to what Facebook and the games that run within Facebook’s ecosystem.
Social media – and now, chat apps – have transformed into entertainment platforms which may be a malfunction of its original use, but for Indonesians who love to chat, joke about and mingle through these services, they are a replacement or supplement to gathering at eateries, home porches or wherever it may be. Because our friends and family are also our recreation and entertainment, who can now stay with us anywhere we go although we are not together physically.
The question is: how far can these chat apps be empowered for other entertainment services?
Ario is a co-founder of Ohd.io, an Indonesian music streaming service. He worked in the digital music industry in Indonesia from 2003 to 2010, and recently worked in the movie and TV industry in Vietnam. Keep up with him on Twitter at @barijoe or his blog at http://barijoe.wordpress.com.
