Messaging: from typing to socializing

Do you remember when there were two kinds of people in the world?  There were those that texted using ABC and those that texted using T9WORD.  Typically, people could only operate with one of these and they despised the alternative option.  My oh my, look how far we’ve come.  That was roughly ten years ago when we were texting on those flip phones that were without full color and they even had that cool antenna on the side.  Text and email used to be the only alternatives to calling on a mobile device, but now the options are seemingly endless.  

Snapchat is one of the biggest ways of communicating with one another.  What began as a simple picture messaging app has developed into its very own social network.  Snapchat now allows users to send videos, posts stories to their profile, and it also keeps record of friendships and such.  Snapchat is very user friendly and it opens up many more emotional channels than a text message can.

Another quirky way of mobile communication is the use of gifs.  Gifs are simply short, animated clips that run on a loop.  There is an app called Gif Keyboard that I use frequently.  Gifs are a lot of fun to use and they make for a better conversation than simply typing yes or no.  Gifs are also great because you have the power to create your own and new gifs are always being created out of current happenings in the media/sports/film fields.  There are only so many words in the English language and I’d hazard to guess that there are more gifs than commonly used words.  

Bitmoji is probably my favorite way to communicate right now.  I love the uniqueness it possesses.  Essentially, it is an app where you get to customize your character to make him or her look just like you and then the app will place your character into all sorts of graphics.  These graphics range from love messages to angry words to movie scenes.  The best part of Bitmoji is when you and a fellow Bitmoji user carry out a full conversation with the use of your cyber characters.  

At the end of the day, all of these advances focus around one thing: personalization.  ABC and T9WORD were never going to be enough.  People in younger generations want everything to be as personalized as possible.  These same people are even beginning to bank socially [see app Venmo].  When people are holding their phones, they want the phones to be a representation of them.  It will be extremely interesting to see what the next advances will be.  It’s easy to look at what we have and say, “That was a no brainer,” but five years ago, would we have thought that Snapchat and Bitmoji would actually be apps worth downloading?