Group messaging: Are you in or out?
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

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A recent Economist article “Fine-tuning the friends list” focused on GroupMe, a “group messaging” service. For the uninitiated, group messaging works under the assumption that people like to communicate in groups, and prefer to do so in almost real time. One person sends a text to a particular pre-selected group, a message that is more likely to be received immediately (as opposed to email), and when someone replies, everyone else gets that message too – kind of like a “Listserv® for Phones"!

The technology, its premise, and the companies associated with it have been a topic of great discussion in the tech world and among those who like to predict successes and failures in start-ups.

GroupMe won the Breakout Digital Trend award recently at the SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The Economist article questions how GroupMe will make money, how users might react to potential spam, how etiquette questions will arise among friends as it is likely to cause the creation of those who belong to the “in” group and those who don’t.

SXSW Interactive Festival is the place where social media entrepreneurs and investors meet, and according to Fast Company, is the “barometer of all trends hot in tech”. Group messaging therefore must be hot news! Fast Company sees this new technology existing in a “Messy, Fragmented World of Group Messaging Apps”.  Although there a number of competitors including Beluga, textPlus, PingChat, Disco (from Google), and many more, experts tend to think GroupMe stands out but some also wonder aloud if this new use of technology is worth all the buzz  - is it a new internet trend? Will it catch on?

NJ.com answers that by calling the technology the “next big thing”. Instead of talking about the problem of fragmentation, they cite ways they think this could be a real internet trend - one that could move “beyond the realm of techies and into the mainstream consciousness”. One signal is a flurry of venture capital activity associated with companies producing the technology, another is when a start-up company is acquired in one season, and yet another is that Google has bothered to get into the mix with their own product. If those events are a recipe for success then this is all good evidence that this is a winning technology.

Group text messaging technology companies hope their services supplant more traditional communication tools like email. Given that multiple studies show that teens and young adults are moving away from email and prefer texting, this may well be just the right time to get into this industry – even if the market is fragmented.

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