That's No Space Station

tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartiertech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech

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Accidentally Shot

Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or locked-in | The Verge

Everyone’s eager to kick SMS to the curb but Bohn is right, the New Messaging landscape is a messy work in progress right now, partly because none of these apps talk to each other.

If your family, friends, and coworkers aren’t nerdy enough to have a religious fervor for one proprietary message service and an irrational hatred for another, they’re too lazy or simply indifferent to bother signing up for 50 different services.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: the “open” services of Old Messaging—like IRC and email—are all either essentially dead or terrible. IRC didn’t make it far and email is a spammy bag of hurt. If you ask me, good riddance.

We’re in a transition period right now, and it’ll be a bumpy ride. We don’t have all the answers yet, but the user experience and usage of every New Messaging we have now is worlds ahead of the previous generation.

Regular users clearly prefer New Messaging. We can work out the rest of the details as we keep building.