Too many chat apps ....
My son is in japan, I have to load line on my phone. I sometimes work in China, I have WeChat. Hangouts for text messages. Work uses Zoom. Another group I hang out with have settled on Slack ....
I want just one
Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
if they charge $1 dollar a year and they have 1 billion users that is $1 billion a year in revenue. Suppose all 1 billion was profit and if you use cost of capital of 10%, you get a valuation of 10 billion. FB paid 19 billion for it. If they charged for it people might just move to FB messanger or Viber or some free app.
They cancelled subscription just this year when they already had billion users. That means people are willing to pay for it.
They used to claim to charge you after 1 year, but I never got charged due to a combination of changing phone numbers, them not asking for it, etc.
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#33I am working on a Line Bot and their api documentation is one of the worst I have ever seen. Hope is that with the IPO they hire some resources to do this.
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#34How does a chat app need 2500 employees? Then again the same question applies to Twitter.
Line isn't an app, it's a business. You think companies that don't make apps at all need zero employees?
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#35Too many chat apps .... My son is in japan, I have to load line on my phone. I sometimes work in China, I have WeChat. Hangouts for text messages. Work uses Zoom. Another group I hang out with have settled on Slack .... I want just one
Email. A federated protocol that can send messages regardless of the other person's host.
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#36How does a chat app need 2500 employees? Then again the same question applies to Twitter.
LINE isn't just chat. In addition to developing stickers and games, their integrated apps include making payments, purchasing music and comics, hailing taxis, searching for jobs, gifting, making reservations, shopping, finding flash sales, and a lot more. They also provide services such as a chatbot platform and hosted blogs.
They are constantly expanding and adding new services, and I'm sure they also have a large sales team trying to get companies on board with everything they add, and they have to do that in multiple countries.
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stickers are great . Stickers let you quickly communicate a reply with two or three taps. They can also lighten things up; I giggle every time my boyfriend uses the "that's great but I am Trying To Work now" sticker I drew for him. What could read as curt and grumpy in text is instead expressed faster by a drawing that is a little bit inherently goofy. YMMV obviously, maybe you're just too serious to ever want to use…
>sticker I drew for him That's pretty neat, but I haven't seen that; how do you do your own stickers? I don't think anyone would argue against being able to send free-form drawings. The stickers in Skype and Telegram, otoh, seem to be mostly "meme junk". Random clips of TV, or (IMO terrible) cartoony drawings. My daughters use them sometimes, same with strings of emoji. But I find it expresses far less than words wou…
Line and Telegram both let users upload their own sticker sets. And I am a professional cartoonist who thinks nothing of spending her spare time drawing a bunch of goofy drawings of one of her characters. Really I kinda had to; all my pro cartoonist friends have them too, and I felt naked talking to them without a set!
http://egypt.urnash.com/blog/tag/stickers/ has an older version of the set I did for myself. Still haven't posted the set I did for my boyfriend.
I'm looking forwards to being able to dump these into Apple's sticker market. Passive income off of something I did for my own use, woohoo!
(There's also a thriving trade in custom stickers: gimme a couple hundred bucks and I'll crank out a set of goofy, expressive drawings of a cartoon character you like to be on the Internet.)
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#38I am working on a Line Bot and their api documentation is one of the worst I have ever seen. Hope is that with the IPO they hire some resources to do this.
Have they opened it up? When I tried looking into it last year the application made it seem like it was only open to fairly large companies.
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#39This stuff is a fad, like the housing bubble and the .com boom. People who don't really understand technology or the internet or how people use both think they smell gold and they take us on these ridiculous roller coaster rides about "The next big killer app" or whatever. Then that app is dead in 5 years. I guess if all one is interested in is making money, then good for them, kudos. But in the grander sense.. "the…
Line is a fad like Facebook is a fad then. Pretty much every single person in Japan with a smartphone has the app and it is the standard way to communicate. I didn't need a phone plan when I lived there because I ended up making maybe 5 actual phone calls over the course of 3 years because LINE totally served my needs. The only people I met with a Facebook were people who liked traveling and were actively looking for…
> I didn't need a phone plan when I lived there because I ended up making maybe 5 actual phone calls over the course of 3 years because LINE totally served my needs.
And of course LINE has now announced their own MVNO where you get unlimited LINE for 500 yen/mo...
Re: Understanding Line, the chat app behind 2016’s largest tech IPO
#40LINE has actually turned out to be my favorite messaging app. Stickers aside, it's one of the few ones with a native desktop app, support for sending video clips, it has a really good group chat implementation (you can attach notes to a chat which is useful for stuff like planning meetups). There's integration with their other services as well - if you subscribe to LINE Music you can embed a song into a chat. It just feels like they made a lot of good decisions overall.
I communicate with some workmates over iMessage which often has delivery problems (random delays), has very poor group chats, and obviously is Apple platform-specific and yet is still inconsistent among the few platforms they do support (you can send links on a Mac that can't be seen on iOS)
Family uses Facebook Messenger which on the desktop is stuck in a small frame on their website and in general just feels impractical and feature-anemic.
Some tech-inclined friends use Hangouts, and I don't communicate with them much because opening up Chrome decimates my battery life. That client was also very slow to adopt basic UI features such as copy/paste of images and drag and drop.
I don't know anyone who uses WhatsApp or Telegram.