A picture is worth a thousand words… that no one wants to type on a tiny screen. And even if you did mash in all that text, it’d still lose the subtleties of sarcasm or sincerity. To express the full range of emotion, messaging apps must put us face-to-face despite our distance.
“We like to think of the camera as the new keyboard,” Facebook Messenger product manager Tony Leach tells me. So nine months ago, his team embarked on an ambitious project to redefine the billion-user chat app as a way to share images, not just words.
That’s manifested as a shutter button on the Messenger home screen, more than 5,000 graphical filters and stickers you can add to photos and videos and computer-generated art that turns any text into an overlaid illustration. Messenger even has its own Stories feature called Messenger Day, which, while currently only available in a few countries, is slated to roll out wider soon, including in the U.S. [Update: Messenger Day is now rolling out worldwide. For how it works, check out our story here]
Messenger Day and that “camera as keyboard” quote should be very familiar. The feature is another interpretation of the Stories slideshow format Snapchat pioneered. And in Snap’s IPO filing, it described its philosophy, saying, “In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones.”
But just as we don’t still call every algorithmically sorted feed a Facebook copycat, nor every chat service an ICQ clone, visual communication is bigger than just Snapchat. No matter who popularized it, any messaging app that doesn’t embrace the concept is doomed.
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