Quote:
Originally Posted by OilKiller
sclitheroe, I realize you are trying your best to diss BB's, but those of us who have them love them and that's all there is to it. If you like iPhone or Android, so be it, not sure why you are trying to call out BB's?
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I’m not at all - in fact I have a BB sitting on my desk here in front of me.
BBM is a fascination I don’t understand though, even as a BB user, with BBM contacts both business and personal. It’s got the same features as any other IM app out there, but it can only communicate with other BB’s. I just don’t get the advantage.
In fact, at work, we all use the Microsoft OCS client on our BB’s, because it means we can chat with mobile users from our computers, or send messages deskside from our phones. MSN messenger accomplishes the same thing for the personal contacts, and lets me reach out to BB users with the app, laptop users, iPhone and Android users via their respective IM clients, etc.
This is the walled garden that I speak of - I cannot for the life of me see how being able to only BBM between phones from one vendor offers any compelling advantage over a more open IM protocol that is supported on PC’s, multiple mobile devices, and in the case of Skype, even some dedicated phone hardware.
Facetime will face the same problem on the iPhone, if Apple doesn’t sufficiently open up the protocol. They claim they will, time will tell if we ever see a facetime implementation for other devices. But if they don’t, they are in the same boat. What good is Facetime when it can only talk to other iPhones?
The value of any network increases exponentially based on the number of nodes that can participate. BBM and Facetime don’t bring that kind of value in their current incarnations. The explosive growth of any kind of IM has always come when the protocol is open, as no one protocol has ever, ever, succeeded in maintaining a monopoly, even regionally.
Security of BBM is one obvious advantage I haven’t mentioned, it’s obviously more secure due to the encryption that other IM clients. For some users maybe that’s an important consideration.
So I’m poking the bear so to speak, but not trying to troll - I learn more about the inner workings of the die hard BB user from the responses here.
Edit: So if I tease about BBM having feature parity with Beejive on an iOS device, it’s because i want to see the comeback that demonstrates what BBM can do that isn’t obvious to me.