The Canadian who wants to dethrone Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The Canadian who wants to dethrone Facebook

theglobeandmail.com

86 pointsvskarine38 comments

It's the only western app that has basic chat capabilities while remaining somewhat not intrusive. In Messenger you need a FB account, for Whatsapp you need a #, for Snapchat ppl can see your Story...but for Kik, all you have to do is add a username to chat, and that's what made it successful

Messenger no longer requires FB.

“You see somebody in a suit, a flashy office, a flashy car—they’re trying to create an image. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool to wear a suit. But it’s a little bit manufactured.”

Honestly in the Bay Area a startup hoodie, t-shirt and jeans is almost a little bit manufactured.

I make a habit of dressing a little more formal than usual in a meeting with T-Shirt/Jeans software engineers, as well as a little less formal than usual in a meeting with Suit/Tie business people, just to be different. That's a manufactured image, too.

Everything is manufactured. The idea that raw authenticity can exist in the construct amd context of 'doing business' is not fathomable to me.

For that matter, most social contexts involve signalling adherence/allegiance to a specific set of values and beliefs: clothing is almost always a uniform of sorts. It helps establish an initial foundation for further communication.

For most people, manufacturing an image is the authentic thing to do. To deliberately interact with society without a manufactured image is in itself inauthentic.

New messaging apps will not change the world. Finding new ways to sell wares to people is not solving big problems. Why do so many entrepreneurs act like they are working on the cure to cancer?

Internet companies are the new media companies. They're in the business of communicating information, so they're extremely good at communicating how awesome they are to the general public. Eventually it creates a self-worth feedback loop.

Most entrepreneurs have a reality distortion field that they sometimes fall victim to, otherwise they wouldn't be doing something as risky (and irrational) as starting a business.

I don't think that's necessary true. The whole thing is a pretty new mentality, previous generations of companies/ founders doesn't seem to have too much of that attitudes (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon etc.?). And those companies did actually change the world. Instagram and Whatsapp? The verdict is still out there.

Silicon Valley has a distortion field that tells us that entrepreneurship is like something it isn't. Try working for a medical hardware startup instead of a software company.

Kik is not new. They've been around for years, with ~200M users.

> New messaging apps will not change the world.

I could see one changing the world. Maybe none of the current contenders, but email is basically a messaging app and it changed the world.

Something equally federated but tailored to 21st century concern (photos, video, encryption, read receipts, etc.) could change the way we talk to people. We have certain forms of in-person discussion (mostly revolving around discretion) that are not well supported (and therefore scale poorly) in electronic media.

   “Microsoft built an operating system for all the desks in the world,” he
   tells me as we walk together on a windy day in October. The always-on nature
   of mobile computing, he argues, offers a chance to rebuild our relationship
   with software. And as he sees it, only Facebook and Kik are competing to do
   that in North America. “This is a race to build an operating system for the
   world, period.”

This is the kind of computing pop culture emanating with glurge that we're dealing with, I suppose. He just might succeed.

I guess this was an attempt to sound like a visionary with a "Big Hairy Audacious Goal"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal

Instead, it reads like a parody. The world isn't a computer and it doesn't need an operating system.

I chuckled at the part with the bath tub.

From reading the wikipedia for his company [0] and "Chinese Mobile App UI Trends" [1] a while back, after getting to the part that their app has a web browser, I got the impression that they are replicating chinese apps for a western audience, where every thing you do (chat, browse, buy) happens through one app. I was not surprised to learn that they got 50M from Tencent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_Messenger [1] http://dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-t...

Kik's user space app approach is novel - https://github.com/kikinteractive/starter-kit - basically allows developers to extend Kik with simple apps written in html / js. That said the most popular apps seem to be about sexting - guess that's a popular use case with Kik's teen audience

A large percentage of all personal communication between humans is about the pursuit of sex

If magically the urge to get laid left me, I'd be in bed laying all day everyday looking up at the ceiling.

So how long until they'll shut down the API? I've become tired of sharecropping...

It sounds like yet another version of IRC that doesn't work on desktop computers and still claims to be "cross platform".

I've been a student at the University of Waterloo for 8 years now, and I can honestly say that I don't know a single person that actually uses Kik. Maybe it's big somewhere else, but certainly not here, where the product was created and holds its offices.

same can be said about Whatsapp which was founded and has offices in Mountain View, CA and I lived there for a while and never saw a single person using it. It's way more popular in other parts of the world: http://www.statista.com/statistics/321460/whatsapp-penetrati...

I read somewhere that Whatsapp gained a lot of traction in countries where per-text fees were still rampant, and the texting within Whatsapp just flowed as normal data with no per-message charges.

When I reluctantly got a smartphone (I wanted interent for new flat, and it was the same price with or with a phone and data bundle as interent alone), I never expected to pay for any apps, especially not whatsapp. I had 500 free texts, and didn't see what the whole fuss over whatsapp was about. A few months later I had a conversation with my mum (who is in a diffrent country) and ten texts had cost me 8 euros (a few of which were yes / no replies). After that I was happy to pay for whatsapp.

Why not just use Facebook? I fail to see what problem Whatsapp solves that Facebook doesn't solve better.

> Why not just use Facebook?

I know it's a difficult concept to grasp, but not everyone wants to be a cog in the Facebook machine. Besides, Facebook is banned in certain parts of the world, so niche alternatives are a good thing.

> I fail to see what problem Whatsapp solves that Facebook doesn't solve better.

Define "better". Installing Facebook just to use its messenger feature is akin to installing Photoshop just to resize pictures. Also, Facebook is a mobile data hog compared to most chat apps, and that matters to some folks.

If you want a full fledged social network with all the trimmings, sure, Facebook is hard to beat; but if all you want is chat, use a chat app.

> not everyone wants to be a cog in the Facebook machine

From Wikipedia: "WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by Facebook Inc. on February 19, 2014, for approximately US$16 billion"

> Installing Facebook just to use its messenger feature is akin to installing Photoshop just to resize pictures

Facebook Messenger is a standalone app that doesn't even require a FB account anymore.

> From Wikipedia: "WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by Facebook Inc. on February 19, 2014, for approximately US$16 billion"

Fair enough, but it was the parent who specifically mentioned WhatsApp. Personally I'd rather just use SMS or XMPP; the first is built into the phone and "just works", the second is open and extensible, with a plethora of clients, and you can run your own server.

And if you believe for a second that Facebook didn't create a full FB shadow account tied to your "messenger only" account, I have a bridge to sell you.

When I was at university I didn't know anyone who played sports. That says much more about my social group than it says about what went on at my university.

I would really recommend reading the whole article, but especially the middle half discussing how Kik is bringing in brands.

It sounds like a texting interface for an AI for major sites; really cool.

Here we go again. Wasn't it "ello" last time?

This is not Ello, this is in the whatsapp/snapchat vein.

Facebook acquihire in 3, 2, 1...

Only if you didn't read the article. This is an app with history and traction. The Facebook bit of the title is linkbaitish.

This was very bad writing.

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