Repost of CSU Signal

There is no doubt that we are more connected than ever before, but I am fatigued with messaging my friends and family. There is no single best way to contact each other. We are constantly battling in our head whether to send an SMS, Facebook Message, iMessage or email.

In the early 2000s, Research In Motion (RIM) owned the smartphone market and everyone who was anyone was using Blackberry Messenger. If you didn’t have a Blackberry, chances are you were a social outcast (at least that’s how it was at the high schools I attended). Fast forward to today and we have iMessages and Facebook messenger fighting to become the defacto messaging platform, except they both suck.

My friends are split among Android and iOS devices which makes iMessages useless. Apple needs to release an Android client, even if it is severely limited in features, but Apple will never risk their market share by giving Android iMessages. A great part about iMessages is that there is a Mac client, even though it is currently buggy. Not to mention that even if you are chatting on your computer your phone will still give you message notifications. Facebook’s Messenger app won’t notify you if you are chatting on the website, so why does iMessage?

Most people have a Facebook account, but how many of them have it linked to their smartphone? A major plus is that even if you don’t have a smartphone you can get Facebook messages sent to your phone through SMS, but very few people have it setup, so any messages sent to them are just sitting in their inbox waiting for them to login. It makes Facebook messages not any better than email on my phone.

Email would be great because everyone has it, but it is not meant for IM and the only thing that sucks more than email with group messaging is SMS. It’s pretty much in the same boat as email. I dare you to try and plan a gathering with your friends over email. It will never happen.

I want a universal way to message my friends and family, but I don’t see that happening in the near future. The best option today is Facebook messenger. I beg you to use it instead of the competition because it won’t become the universal way to message unless we start using it daily.