Facebook Messenger adds to RIM’s headaches
August 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
As though RIM did not have enough problems already, now it has Facebook to contend with. The social networking giant has unveiled Facebook Messenger, a dedicated mobile messaging application targeted squarely at one of RIM’s crown jewels, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).
BBM has been one of the main reasons for RIM’s unexpected success among teenagers, especially in western Europe, and such apps are shifting some usage away from SMS. Facebook’s challenger will also compete with over-the-top offerings like WhatsApp, differentiating itself with full integration with the handset’s address book. This should make it popular with carriers, as BBM is, especially as it generates responses via text, creating SMS revenue for operators, even while representing a step forward from texting for end users.
The product is the fruit of Facebook’s acquisition of Beluga earlier this year, and integrates with Facebook Messages. This is part of the broader strategy by the social firm – whose dominance in its space is under some pressure from newer offerings – to create a full mobile apps platform which could rival Google’s or Apple’s. Recent moves in mobile commerce, new APIs and location awareness all sound warning bells for Google, which has recently responded with its own social network, Google+, which has a heavy mobile focus.
Facebook’s advantage lies in its huge user base – on mobile devices, this totals about 250m active customers, it claims, and these are twice as active as non-mobile users of the service. The company has alliances with 200 cellcos in 60 countries, and several partnerships with handset makers to pre-integrated its app on their devices, or even create full ‘Facebook phones’ like those from INQ.
Controlling all types of messaging from directly within the Facebook user interface will be appealing to many users, and a cause for concern at RIM, whose recent OS upgrade featured better social network integration. But all the major mobile software players will be mounting their own bids to be the default app for messaging, still the most important driver of wireless usage. Apple will soon release iMessage, though like BBM, this is of course confined to one platform, while Facebook will work across iPhone, Android and others (though not yet BlackBerry), and will have a featurephone option based on SMS.
“Assuming that Facebook Messenger provides a compelling messaging experience, it has the potential to achieve a greater reach than BBM, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk or the as-yet unlaunched iMessage,” Pamela Clark-Dickson, senior analyst at Informa, told Telecoms.com. “Facebook Messenger’s integration with the phone address book may also be a key factor in inducing either churn among the existing users of other, similar applications, or in encouraging adoption by new users.”
